Google Cloud Monitoring debuts; Google’s Stackdriver keeps supporting Amazon’s cloud

Updated at 4:42 p.m. Pacific to add that Stackdriver on its own can monitor applications on Amazon Web Services.

Google Cloud Monitoring, a tool developers can use to track the performance of application components, is now available for Google Cloud Platform customers to try out, free of charge, Google said today.

“Cloud Monitoring streamlines operations by unifying infrastructure monitoring, system/OS monitoring, service/uptime monitoring, charting and alerting into a simple and powerful hosted service,” product manager Dan Belcher wrote in a blog post on the news today.

The service integrates the technology from Google’s acquisition of Stackdriver last year.

One peculiarity about the deal: The Stackdriver technology at the heart of the new service, which is still available, can monitor applications on the Amazon Web Services public cloud, a direct competitor to Google. But indeed it’s sensible for software providers to work with multi-cloud deployments, especially when that includes usage of the Amazon cloud, which is the biggest cloud around today.

“We’re working to integrate the rest of the Stackdriver technology into Cloud Monitoring with the goal of providing a unified monitoring solution for Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and hybrid customers,” Belcher wrote.

Google first showed off Google Cloud Monitoring last year at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

Last week, another tool for working with applications on Google’s cloud, Google Cloud Trace, came out in beta. That service shows information about latency for requests from external services that are buried in application code. Google Cloud Monitoring, by contrast, provides insight into the health of the cloud infrastructure that applications depend on, as well as some of the open-source software tools that applications can contain.