SAN ANTONIO, Texas, Aug. 22, — Today, Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company, announced the release of Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, a flexible and highly scalable solution that empowers customers to track the health of their infrastructure – including websites, ports and protocols. The service provides real time alerts allowing customers to react quickly and help prevent downtime. With Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, customers can easily monitor their infrastructure whether it's hosted on-premise, off-premise, with any cloud provider or any location across the globe.

"Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is an exciting addition to our product portfolio because it proactively and seamlessly helps customers gain insight into their infrastructure," said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace. "In addition, this technology strengthens our support of open cloud solutions, as it allows customers to not only monitor their Rackspace infrastructure, but other vendors or in-house applications. In today's IT world, many customers use multiple vendors or house some applications in-house, so this product provides one easy solution to monitor all IT infrastructure from a single interface, regardless of vendor or location."

With Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, customers get:

• Customized Alerts – Set up customized alerts via the Control Panel or API to monitor websites, URLs, ports and protocols.
• Monitor Any Infrastructure Anywhere – Monitor infrastructure irrespective of where it's hosted – off-premise, on-premise or any Cloud across the globe, while also helping customers avoid getting "locked-in" to a specific technology.
• Global and Regional Granularity – Provide global customers with the ability to monitor their IT infrastructure from multiple regions across the world for redundancy and to ensure customers visiting from multiple countries find acceptable response times.
• Auto Scaling – Scales on demand and it will keep up with the most robust builds – even adding thousands of Cloud Servers in minutes.
• Time Savings – Cloud Based: No installation. No upgrade. No maintenance.

"Monitoring is an important piece of the cloud computing puzzle to give customers' visibility and control over their infrastructures" said Agatha Poon, research manager, global cloud computing for 451 Research. "Cloud offerings like Rackspace Cloud Monitoring that provide a view of infrastructure health and performance regardless of deployment environments-customers' premises, Rackspace-hosted or third-party hosted-will increasingly become mainstream offerings."

The Cloud Monitoring solution is based on the technology from Cloudkick, a company Rackspace acquired in 2010. The Cloudkick star development team has been working hard to incorporate this world-class monitoring system for the cloud into the Rackspace product portfolio, using leading technologies such as node.js, lua, and our open source project dreadnot.

"Ultimately, we sought out to make something that would make developers lives easier while allowing the rest of the business to feel confident," said Dan DiSpaltro, director of product at Rackspace and a founder of Cloudkick. "Cloudkick was one of the first tools to make the transition to the cloud paradigm easier to understand and now we have fine tuned it into what Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is today, a reliable and scalable monitoring service."

In the future, Rackspace expects to include additional features to its Cloud Monitoring to bring greater intelligence and actionable information to users. The new enhancements would be designed to allow customers to be more proactive by providing infrastructure health information that allows them to identify and correct issues before they become problems that impact users. These future capabilities are expected to include:

• Agent-based monitoring that tracks and reports on various items from standard components (CPU, disk and memory etc.) to custom application and service metrics.
• Summarization that could help customers understand the root cause of problems.
• Data aggregation that can allow customers to look at sets of data versus individual entities.

For more information on Rackspace Cloud Monitoring and how to sign up, visit http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/monitoring/.

About Rackspace

Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company, delivering open technologies and powering more than 190,000 customers worldwide. Rackspace provides its renowned Fanatical Support across a broad portfolio of IT products, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. The company offers choice, flexibility and freedom from vendor lock in. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and is featured on Fortune's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. Rackspace was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the "2011 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting." Rackspace is headquartered in San Antonio with offices and data centers around the world. For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

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Source: Rackspace Hosting