Rackspace Launches Cloud Monitoring to Help Companies Proactively Track the Health of their Cloud and Web Infrastructure Hosted Anywhere

London, UK - August 22, 2012 – Today, Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, announced the release of Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, a flexible and highly scalable solution that empowers customers to track the health of their infrastructure  - including websites, ports and protocols. The service provides real time alerts allowing customers to react quickly and help prevent downtime.  With Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, customers can easily monitor their infrastructure whether it's hosted on-premise, off-premise, with any cloud provider or any location across the globe.

"Since we acquired Cloudkick in 2010 we have been working together to engineer a proactive data and application monitoring tool capable of helping customers protect their operational business assets from failover scenarios," said Nigel Beighton, VP Technology for Rackspace, "Cloud Monitoring is an impressive joint effort which seamlessly integrates with existing IT stacks to provide monitoring of any environment of IT infrastructure from a single interface. It is a great addition to our cloud offering and further strengthens our support of open cloud solutions."

With Rackspace Cloud Monitoring, customers get:
•    Customised Alerts - Set up customised alerts via the Control Panel or API to monitor websites, URLs, ports and protocols.
•    Monitor Any Infrastructure Anywhere – Monitor infrastructure irrespective of where it's hosted - off-premise, on-premise or any Cloud across the globe, while also helping customers avoid getting "locked-in" to a specific technology.
•    Global and Regional Granularity - Provide global customers with the ability to monitor their IT infrastructure from multiple regions across the world for redundancy and to ensure customers visiting from multiple countries find acceptable response times.
•    Auto Scaling – Scales on demand and it will keep up with the most robust builds - even adding thousands of Cloud Servers in minutes.
•    Time Savings – Cloud Based: No installation. No upgrade. No maintenance.

"Monitoring is an important piece of the cloud computing puzzle to give customers' visibility and control over their infrastructures" said Agatha Poon, research manager, global cloud computing for 451 Research. "Cloud offerings like Rackspace Cloud Monitoring that provide a view of infrastructure health and performance regardless of deployment environments-customers' premises, Rackspace-hosted or third-party hosted-will increasingly become mainstream offerings."

The Cloud Monitoring solution is based on the technology from Cloudkick, a company Rackspace acquired in 2010. The Cloudkick star development team has been working hard to incorporate this world-class monitoring system for the cloud into the Rackspace product portfolio, using leading technologies such as node.js, lua, and our opensource project dreadnot.

"Ultimately, we sought out to make something that would make developers lives easier while allowing the rest of the business to feel confident," said Dan DiSpaltro, director of product at Rackspace and a founder of Cloudkick. "Cloudkick was one of the first tools to make the transition to the cloud paradigm easier to understand and now we have fine tuned it into what Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is today, a reliable and scalable monitoring service."

In the future, Rackspace expects to include additional features to its Cloud Monitoring to bring greater intelligence and actionable information to users. The new enhancements would be designed to allow customers to be more proactive by providing infrastructure health information that allows them to identify and correct issues before they become problems that impact users. These future capabilities are expected to include:
•    Agent-based monitoring that tracks and reports on various items from standard components (CPU, disk and memory etc.) to custom application and service metrics.
•    Summarization that could help customers understand the root cause of problems.
•    Data aggregation that can allow customers to look at sets of data versus individual entities.

For more information on Rackspace Cloud Monitoring and how to sign up, visit www.rackspace.co.uk/cloud-monitoring.

ENDS