This may be old news, but I thought I'd put it out there, anyway: the first of what are sure to be many third-party services dedicated to monitoring various cloud computing services is being developed by Hyperic to watch over Amazon Web Services and Google's AppEngine. The overview, currently in beta, is freely available at CloudStatus.com. Everything is looking good this morning, I'm happy to report.

The publicly available monitoring doesn't delve too deeply into the systems, but does provide performance information in addition to a simple up/down indicator. Using the company's Cloud Service Plugin, clients can integrate the monitoring service directly with their applications, presumably providing failover or notification internally. Hyperic also offers updates via Twitter feed (although it looks to be about equal parts outage notification/marketing drivel).

The various outages at and relative paucity of internal information from various cloud providers, together with their rather dismal initial handling of such incidents make services such as Hyperic's inevitable, and that's probably a good thing. Pundits have been critiquing cloud performance and suggesting that perhaps it's not time to give up on your own datacenters yet, but those datacenters have had the benefit of monitoring and reporting watchguard software for years. Although cloud service providers should learn to bundle such offerings, a third-party service provides that much more assurance, and gives potential utility computing customers some independent verification that they are getting what they paid for, as well as options for addressing any failures in those services.