Uptime First To Solve Cloud Cost Complexities

Cloud computing is hot and will only get hotter during the next few years, but one of the burning issues "clouding" its future is figuring out what customers actually are paying for, says Uptime software.

The Toronto, Canada-based provider of systems management software for physical and virtual server monitoring, capacity planning, and service and application monitoring says that the existing metrics of availability and performance must be complemented with user visibility into how much cloud computing is costing in real time across applications, services, lines of business, user location and instance. It says performance and availability are now commodities in cloud computing, whereas the cost of cloud computing is the key differentiator and will be the essential factor that influences what, when and where IT organizations deploy.

To address this gap, the company is releasing UptimeCloud, which it calls the first real-time, integrated cloud cost and cloud capacity management software-as-a service (SaaS) tool. Built around the concept of "economic cloud intelligence," the service features dashboards to monitor and measure the cost of cloud deployments in real time, predict future cloud costs based on real workloads, provide automated cloud cost saving recommendations for cloud deployments, and help IT departments ensure cloud deployments are perfectly fitted to capacity needs.

According to a new study from IDC (Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2010-2014 Forecast), public cloud services will grow five times faster than traditional IT products, from over $16 billion in 2009 to $55.5 billion by 2014. However, many CIOs have serious concerns about cost monitoring/management, says the research company. In an earlier study on the cloud systems management software market (Worldwide Cloud Systems Management Software Forecast and Trends: 2010-2015), IDC forecast that organizations would be spending $2.5 billion in 2015 on managing a hybrid mix of public cloud, private cloud and non-cloud IT resources.

With UptimeCloud, users can monitor how much the cloud costs by application, line of business, user, location, account and instance in real time, as well as view one or multiple cloud accounts (individually or aggregated) through a single dashboard and identify departmental or line-of-business cloud usage (for SLAs, billing, etc.). On the predictive side, customers can trend and predict future cloud costs by hour, day, month, year or any custom time frame, as well as receive automated "cost-of-cloud" estimates and saving recommendations.This is the first time analyst Dennis Callaghan, The 451 Group, is aware of that a performance monitoring vendor is showing IT performance of the cloud in context with how much those cloud resources cost. "Given that any move to the cloud, either wholesale or as part of a hybrid cloud model, will be at least in part driven by cost savings, this figures to be a valuable tool," he said. "Organizations will want to know what kind of performance they’re getting from cloud resources and how much that’s costing them vs. their internal infrastructures."

Although broader public cloud support is in the works for future releases, uptimeCloud currently supports only Amazon's EC2. Callaghan says another potential drawback is that there are no modeling capabilities as yet. "If someone wants to determine what kind of service levels they can deliver through the cloud and what that will cost them, this tool can’t yet do that," he said. "They would have to build those models themselves from ongoing use of UptimeCloud."

This offering is, at least temporarily, a game-changer, he says, although he expects other companies may soon follow suit. "This also could give Uptime more traction in the service provider space, which they haven’t really penetrated, whereas their rivals like Nimsoft and ScienceLogic have."

Callaghan also expects service level agreement adherence to be huge. "I think that’s what makes this cost management component so valuable, especially for service providers. The ability to gauge how much capacity is required to provide a certain service level to a customer and what that service level ultimately will cost is powerful, and this release gives Uptime some capabilities there."

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