I'm just curious what tools you prefer to do EC2 Monitoring? Hyperic, Nagios, Cacti, other? Thoughts on the new CloudWatch monitoring?

Hi John, I'm also interested in these tools / services. Any feedback yet?

At crowdSPRING, we've been using Cacti... because it works. But, our setup does not need to add nodes dynamically, in which case I don't think Cacti would work well anymore.

I'm very interested in "cloud ready" monitoring solutions, which could fit better with growing/shrinking node sets. Since we're standardizing on Ubuntu, I imagine we'll give Landscape a go at some point:

http://www.ubuntu.com...

Early on, we looked at monitoring and decided to try a commercial service instead of doing it ourselves. There are several of these services which will provide monitoring from multiple locations around the world. The one we tried was from Navisite who use the same service to monitor servers in their own data centers. It required using an SNMP agent and provided both monitoring and alerting at a reasonable cost. We also tried other services that were focussed more on web site availability and response time.

Just wanted to inform you all about the first free, open-source Amazon EC2 Cloud Monitoring solution out there !

Enterprise Monitoring Made Virtual

The Mikoomi monitoring appliance is the first production-ready virtual appliance based on the open source monitoring framework Zabbix and can be deployed on top of virtualization systems like VMware and VirtualBox.

The solution comes with built-in operating system monitoring for Linux, Unix and Windows and monitoring of many other common infrastructure components like routers, switches and firewalls and standard applications.

Mikoomi has been developing and releasing appliance add-on agents to monitor common software systems like databases and application servers. Furthermore, both the Mikoomi appliance and agents can be extended with additional capabilities and integrated with your enterprise ticketing and helpdesk system for automatic generation of tickets when Mikoomi discovers any issues. Finally, since Mikoomi is not licensed by "seat" or by "monitored entities", all your helpdesk and support staff can have first-hand insight into system and monitoring information.

Cloud is synonymous with infrastructure and application services on-demand - allowing you to ramp up virtual machines or instances from 10 to 100 servers in minutes. Traditional monitoring solutions from the "big 4 dinosaurs" have difficulty in adopting to such dynamics.

Mikoomi on the other hand is adept at this. The Mikoomi Amazon EC2 monitoring agent is able to "detect" the creation and destruction of instances. Furthermore, the auto-discovery features of Zabbix can be used to automatically have Mikoomi monitor CPU, memory, I/O, filesystem and other details about newly created instances.

Whether you are just starting to explore cloud computing or already have a substantial deployment in the cloud, Mikoomi can help you accelerate your cloud adoption and help mature your processes and management of IT resources and applications in the cloud.

Mikoomi brings extensive traditional data center and cloud monitoring capabilities and solutions that fit the way your organization works. And Mikoomi also understands that monitoring is just one piece of your IT operations jigsaw puzzle.