Unigma Rises to Cloud-Monitoring Challenge

Unigma rolled out a set of IT monitoring tools geared for the top-three infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings that is designed specifically for IT service providers.

Designed to give providers of IT services simultaneous visibility into Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine, the tools use the APIs those cloud service providers (CSPs) expose to monitor both the performance of a cloud service and what it costs to make those services available to the end customer, Unigma founder Kirill Bensonoff said.

“There may be monitoring tools for the big three clouds for IT organizations,” said Bensonoff. “But we’re the only monitoring tool designed for IT service providers that plugs into the big-three cloud services that was specifically designed for service providers.”

Unigma also announced the general availability of its Network Operation Center, which partners can use as a white-label NOC in place of building out their own.

As one of the first adopters of the Unigma service, Alex Ho, COO of ComputerSupport.com., said the IT services provider needed a way to monitor the top-three CSPs because it’s increasingly clear end customers want to be able to pit the IaaS offerings against one another. The challenge is that ComputeSupport.com did not want to have to acquire and deploy multiple cloud monitoring tools to help customers navigate the major CSPs.

“Amazon, Microsoft and Google have their own disparate tools,” said Ho. “A single pane of glass makes it a lot easier for IT operations.”

It’s already apparent that IaaS offerings have become a commodity; as such, customers now want to be able to choose between those commodity services based on the actual performance delivered for any type of application workload, said Ho.

To make it simpler to slipstream cloud monitoring into existing IT management frameworks widely used in the channel, Unigma has integrated its platform with tools from ConnectWise, Kaseya and Autotask.

As the adoption of cloud computing services continues to accelerate, more solution providers are going to be called upon by their customers to monitor cloud services on their behalf. But that does not necessarily mean every solution provider needs to go to the trouble of building their own NOCs to achieve that goal.

Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for more than 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.