Google Acquires Popular Cloud Monitoring Firm Stackdriver

Google has snapped up Stackdriver, a popular service that has been monitoring workloads for Amazon Web Services and Rackspace cloud platforms. The Boston-based startup will join Google’s Cloud Platform team, giving the giant some cloud talent as well as taking out a valued supporter of rival AWS.

Stackdriver will continue to work with other clouds, but the focus will be on developing for Google.

There has been a lot of activity by public cloud giants in the area of cloud monitoring, with providers investing more in these capabilities through buying existing services or developing their own.

Microsoft, another major contender for cloud market share, recently made a similar acquisition, buying Greenbutton, which provides a dashboard for monitoring cloud applications, prioritizing jobs and helping to manage costs.

AWS recently launched an in-house tool that works along similar lines called Cost Explorer. It helps drive deeper insight into cloud usage and spending on the provider's platform.

“I’ve been working with folks from the Stackdriver team for months, and I've been enormously impressed with their domain expertise, their engineering talent and their clear passion to make the lives of cloud developers better," Toby Smith, senior manager of cloud infrastructure engineering, wrote in an entry on Google+. “I'm absolutely thrilled that they're joining our cloud efforts.”

Stackdriver tools monitor infrastructure, systems and applications. Customers use them to analyze things like CPU usage for predictive capabilities and minimizing downtime. It provides monitoring across a wealth of AWS services, including elastic load balancing and Dynamo databases.