I'm currently using Cloudkick's 1 server developer plan.
I would really love to use them to monitor all of our servers but their current plans don't work for us. We use lots of tiny instances and virtual machines. This means for us the cost of Cloudkick for each VM would be around the actual monthly cost of that VM.
If you have are in a different position to myself and are using larger instances then I would recommend you give them a try!
We use Nagios on one of our Linodes to do our server monitoring. It's set up to do nearly constant monitoring; the last time we had a glitch, I received a text message about high CPU load before the graph at Linode had even updated to show the spike.
That costs us $20/month, except we're doing it on a server that was already required for another service and had plenty of disk and CPU to spare, so ... really it costs us nothing, and gives us most of CloudKick's features, in our specific case.
Given their pricing, I think I'd rather take that money each month and pay someone to contribute to Nagios instead. :-/
We use Nagios combined with Ganglia for webpop.com as well and it's a great solution.
But if we weren't on a tight budget (we're bootstrapped) I would have gone with something like CloudKick no doubt.
The server for Nagios might be cheap, but installing, refining and updating our monitors does take time that could be used on developing our product instead.
Monitoring just under 50 servers with them on GoGrid. Just started actually and setup has been a breeze. We ran a nagios installation for a long time but the time and effort spent on running, updating and installing it just made it not worth the effort for us.
Recommended. We monitor about 30 servers with them (Rackspace Cloud). I consider them to be one more piece of the sysadmin replaced with a SASS solution. While you certainly could setup Nagios or whatever else for monitoring all of your machines, it's incredibly easy and far less maintenance to let CloudKick handle things.
Maybe I'm too opinionated about the whole thing, but I have yet to find a cloud management solution that does things the way I want. Cloudkick, Rightscale, Chef, all seem to work ok, if you're willing to buy in to their preferred way of doing things. If you want to stray from that, though, its a lot of work, and brittle.
I don't know that they're wrong, and I'm right, exactly, but it feels like they're all trying to paper over the features and drawbacks of cloud, and making it act more like traditional hardware that people are more familiar.
We are trying to create a new way of doing things, right now we have a lot more on the monitoring side of coin; however, projects like cast are some of the next generation of tooling for CK. http://github.com/cloudkick/cast
I do not think so. We use Nagios to monitor our EC2 servers (CPU, etc.) and then AlertFox ($199/month) for external transaction monitoring.
That works well for our 25 EC2 instances (+ a few at the Planet)
Great PR but probably misleading. For instance, we signed up initially and didn't find it too useful (although they've added a lot of features since then). We didn't delete our account until just now and when we logged in (again just now) we had 6k notifications from instance startup/shutdown. Never once did we "manage" any of these instances on cloudkick.
I'm sure you were trying to point out that perhaps Azure doesn't meet your criteria for IaaS (yet). But, I think CloudKick offers many services that are possible to work with Azure right now.
Full VM access is just around the corner and people will be shopping for CloudKick types services very soon. My company is ready to be your first Azure customer.
Cloudkick Blog: "...we've just hit 1,000,000 servers registered all-time in Cloudkick."
Those statements aren't even close to equivalent. The HN guidelines say it well:
https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/2010/oct/14/one-million-serve...