SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic Inc. has announced the newest cloud provider to be supported by its CloudStatus service-Google App Engine.

Google App Engine is the second significant cloud service to be monitored by CloudStatus, which launched in June with support for Amazon Web Services. Support for additional cloud providers is planned for the coming months.

Hyperic's free CloudStatus service delivers real-time, independent insight into the health and performance of the App Engine, giving users a greater level of confidence in the reliability, availability and scalability of web applications running on Google's infrastructure.

"Monitoring helps maintain the health and performance of any application, including those powered by App Engine," said Paul McDonald, an App Engine product manager at Google. "We are excited to work with Hyperic to provide additional transparency to our service's real-time performance."

The addition of App Engine monitoring is designed to provide customers with the ability to obtain up-to-the-second perspectives on performance and network connectivity from both inside and outside the App Engine platform. The initial release will allow for continuous monitoring of the health and performance of major App Engine infrastructure, including the DataStore, Memcache, and global network connectivity. CloudStatus uses App Engine-specific management plug-ins to collect measurements that provide administrators and developers with unprecedented insight into the health of the App Engine platform.

As part of this development, Hyperic is also announcing the availability of the first cloud-specific management plug-in for its flagship product, Hyperic HQ. The new plug-in extends the full monitoring and management capabilities of Hyperic HQ to App Engine users, enabling them to examine the performance of their own custom applications running in the cloud. This plug-in is free for download on HyperForge.

Service reliability can make or break businesses today. To ensure reliability and more completely understand and trust cloud service stability, customers need transparency into real performance and availability. CloudStatus addresses this need. A free, third-party hosted service, CloudStatus provides a comprehensive measure of service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. It allows users to obtain detailed, service-specific metrics on any of the monitored offerings, providing the perspective needed to determine the cause of any performance changes within their cloud-based applications.

"Cloud computing is changing the way businesses consume and deliver applications. Internet leaders like Google allow these businesses to eliminate the need to maintain their own infrastructure while also gaining affordable access to unlimited scalability," said Javier Soltero, Hyperic CEO. "We're thrilled to be working with vendors like Google to define the next generation of monitoring and management tools needed to assure performance and reliability for applications running in the cloud-and in the process help cloud computing realize its full potential."