Uptime tackles cloud cost management

IT systems developer uptime software has expanded its approach with the introduction of uptimeCloud, a cloud cost monitoring and capacity management tool the vendor is delivering in the software-as-a-service format.

The purpose of uptimeCloud is to address what the company describes as confusing and complex cloud vendor pricing by providing how much cloud computing costs in real-time, across applications and services and for various users and instances within an organization. The system also is designed to predict future cloud costs and generate automated cost-saving recommendations to help IT pros optimize their environments.

“uptimeCloud is the simple—and only—way to manage cost and capacity in the cloud together, in real-time,” said Alex Bewley, CTO of uptime software. “It’s the first real-time cloud cost monitoring tool that uses live data to eliminate confusing and complex cloud vendor pricing.”

Besides giving everyone from the CIO down to IT administrators’ visibility into cloud costs broken out in various ways, Bewley said, uptimeCloud can be scaled to view multiple accounts from a single dashboard. The company views cost as a critical factor to cloud decision-making—as important as availability and performance.

“uptimeCloud measures the actual real-time spend that is occurring in the cloud. It also shows monthly spend to-date against budget, and finally it accurate forecasts a cloud monthly spend based on real-time deployment and dynamic pricing changes, up-to the second,” Bewley said. “It also makes recommendations on how administrators can save more—and exactly how much they will save—by changing instance sizes or pre-purchasing cloud capacity.”

As a future upgrade, Bewley said, companies will be able to see the exact cost differences of their workloads across different cloud vendors (e.g., Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace, etc).

The new platform is meant to complement uptime’s core IT management system, up.time, which addresses performance and availability management of physical, virtual, and cloud servers and applications from a single dashboard. That platform is also offered in the SaaS model.