Cloudkick, a start-up which has been offering free multi-cloud management and monitoring services in preview (and which is the originator and sponsor of the open-source libcloud project), has launched its commercial offering.

Quite a bit has been written about Cloudkick in other venues, so I’ll offer a musing of a different sort: I am contemplating the degree to which cloud-agnostic monitoring service providers will evolve into general monitoring SaaS vendors. A tiny fraction of cloud IaaS users will actually be significantly multi-cloud, whereas a far vaster addressable market exists for really excellent monitoring tools, including cost-effective ways of doing third-party monitoring for the purposes of cloud SLA enforcement. Even though enterprises are likely to extend their own internal monitoring systems into their cloud environments, there will continue to be a need for third-party monitoring, and for many organizations, third-party monitoring that can also feed alerts into internal monitoring systems will be a popular choice.

Cloudkick has been interesting in the context of the debate over alleged capacity issues on Amazon EC2. Their monitoring has been showing latency issues growing in severity since Christmas or so. The public nature of this data, among other things, has pushed Amazon into making a statement that they don’t have overcapacity problems; it’s an interesting example of how making such data openly available can bring pressure to bear on service providers.