I’ve been a proponent of cloud-based monitoring of networks, sites, servers, applications and transactions, etc., for a long time. I’m such a nut about it because I know what a revolutionary convenience it is for companies to not have to devote all kinds of resources, time and money to making sure their web businesses are running smoothly.

And I know, personally, having come from the old-fashioned environment where you ran monitoring software on internal servers, and you couldn’t do anything remotely, what that was like. The time, the money, the energy used up!

So, I was surprised to read (but not really because I knew it would come some day) that Hyperic, one of the second-generation monitoring companies, introduced an upgrade to its platforms that lets IT managers monitor virtual environments, better plan for capacity and track performance of services delivered via cloud computing.

Hyperic ‘s cloud monitoring capabilities in this release is focused on Amazon Web Services. Company officials say it is experienced managing private clouds of 3,500-plus VMware and XenServer virtualization deployments, according to the article I read.

My competitive juices start racing whenever I read about new competitors. And in this case, even though we’re a young company and Hyperic’s been around for about five years now, I consider them a competitor – because they’re just now developing monitoring for the cloud.

But let me ask out loud, is Hyperic’s cloud monitoring service really a cloud tool? That’s a question, honestly.

They’re calling it an upgrade, yes, as in upgrade to software (HQ 4.0)? Looks to me like it is still relying on software to monitor – rather than using the truly virtual infrastructure of the cloud and all its benefits for monitoring.

Just my thoughts!