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Yesterday, CloudKick announced that they have officially come out of beta and is rolling out a freemium model for their server management and monitoring service. With the announcement, CloudKick also officially launched support of the GoGrid Cloud in its management, alerting, graphing and monitoring suite.
CloudKick offers a variety of robust services to help you quickly and easily gain insight into your infrastructure hosted on GoGrid. Some services and features include:
- Monitor critical metrics
- Simple management tools
- Flexible alerting to multiple addresses including SMS
- Visualize performance data
- Multiple users
- Changelog tool
- CloudKick agent
Depending on the plan that you are on (they range from free to $599+ a month), you get a variety of services mentioned above. The difference in plans depend on the number of servers, users, data retention, alerts and the type of support you desire.
There is a special GoGrid Signup page (details below) that will automatically pre-populate your GoGrid servers within CloudKick.
Setting Up a CloudKick Account for GoGrid
GoGrid is the first Cloud within the CloudKick ecosystem to fully integrate the registration and signup process. As CloudKick CEO and co-founder, Alex Polvi states:
“With CloudKick for GoGrid customers it has never been easier to get your server monitoring and management tools up and running, in fact, our GoGrid implementation represents the first cloud provider with seamless signup and integration capabilities.”
To start, simply visit this Sign Up page and create a new CloudKick account. After that, just log in using your GoGrid portal account information. Below is the process to create a CloudKick account that automatically pulls in your GoGrid server information.
Enter in the details you wish for your CloudKick account.
After that, you are asked for your GoGrid account credentials (note: these credentials are not stored but merely used to pull in your GoGrid API key(s) or allow you to create a new API key):
Lastly, if you already have a GoGrid API created, simply select that and click Next, or you can create a new API on the fly:
Once you have done that, your GoGrid servers will automatically show up in the Nodes section of CloudKick:
Using CloudKick to Manage & Monitor your GoGrid Environment
Once you have set up your CloudKick account, you have a variety of options available to you to manage and monitor your GoGrid infrastructure. The site is generally divided into 6 main sections:
- Overview – gives you the current snapshot of your environment
- Monitor – allows you to view, setup and tweak your various alert monitors
- Graph – this section provides robust graphical interfaces to your infrastructure
- Activity – any changes or additions to your account appear here
- Change Log – if you are running Ubuntu (only distro currently supported, CentOS/RHEL and Windows support will be coming soon I have been told) and have installed the CloudKick agents, you can see a change log as entered by sysadmins and others
- Account – manage your CloudKick account here
I recently hooked up my personal GoGrid account to CloudKick so that I could understand what it can do for me. Below are a few screenshots of items I have currently configured.
On the Overview section, you see a list of all of the servers that are actively being monitored. Below is the expanded view of my server on GoGrid:
Within that section, you can click on the Monitors sub-tab to see active monitors for that server (green=good):
I restarted my server and the screenshot below shows an updated status (red=bad) – I also received email notifications (as I had configured those to be sent when issues happened):
Under the Graphs sub-tab, you can quickly create and view graphs of various metrics available (including ping, http and ssh) on that particular server (as reported from different monitoring/logging locations):
If you have the CloudKick Agent installed, you can get insight into the performance of CPU and Memory usage under the Diagnostics tab. (Currently supporting Ubuntu with CentOS/RHEL and Windows coming shortly.)
Within the Monitors section, you can view active monitors and configure new ones:
Basic monitors like HTTP, HTTPS, Ping/ICMP and SSH are immediately available. Other monitors require the CloudKick agent to be installed on your server(s):
Perhaps one of my most favorite items within CloudKick is the ability to instantly spawn an SSH session right within the browser. You have to configure a pre-shared key but once you have that set, simply click on the terminal link to open a dynamic SSH session right within your browser. Below is “top” running on my server:
Individual servers within the Nodes section can have Tags applied to them to make identification a bit easier:
You can also color-code specific servers:
You can “destroy” and “reboot” GoGrid servers from within the UI as well:
You also have the ability to include other Cloud providers within your environment.
GoGrid & libcloud
Lastly, the founders of CloudKick helped create libcloud which is a pure python client library for interacting with many cloud server providers. It was designed to make the development of products running in the cloud a bit easier. libcloud is now an independent free software project licensed under the Apache License (2.0). libcloud is fully supported on GoGrid in terms of lists, reboots, creations, destroys, images and sizes actions.
Be sure to give CloudKick a try for managing and monitoring your GoGrid Servers!
Michael Sheehan
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