AccelOps announced the addition of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) monitoring, unique geo-location features, as well as enhancements for Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database monitoring to version 3.6 of its software.

These enhancements are designed to address the burgeoning challenges faced by IT in securing and maintaining increasingly complex virtualized and distributed infrastructures and a diverse spectrum of mobile access devices.

In this software release AccelOps adds richer monitoring of Amazon’s EC2, the world’s most popular cloud service. By collecting information from inside the EC2 infrastructure rather than through a simple application programming interface, AccelOps receives more comprehensive, real-time log and event information. The AccelOps application uses this detailed system data for real-time alerting, and it is stored in a database to satisfy compliance requirements or for future forensic analysis.

"Amazon EC2 cloud service is becoming increasingly popular with organizations that need to quickly scale IT resources when user demand exceeds their own internal capabilities," said Elie Antoun, CEO at AccelOps. "By monitoring everything from within the Amazon cloud in as complete a fashion as the internal infrastructure, AccelOps is enabling customers to make smarter decisions based on full insight into security, availability and performance metrics across the entire spectrum of infrastructure resources. AccelOps is committed to helping customers improve operational efficiency and maintain compliance in hybrid cloud environments."

AccelOps can collect virtually any metric available via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Secure Shell (SSH), and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) within the EC2 cloud. This capability gives IT far more granularity and insight into operating system-level and application-level metrics. For customers that use both internal IT resources and cloud services, AccelOps provides a single integrated end-to-end view, simplifying security, performance, and compliance reporting.

This release builds upon previous Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database monitoring capabilities by providing extensive proactive alerting. Rules may now include additional thresholds on metrics such as table space size and growth, database locking, blocking activity, backup activity, error logs, and average wait times, allowing IT to take pre-emptive action to avoid database performance impacts.

AccelOps further simplifies IT monitoring tasks by adding more contextual intelligence. The application now appends every device log and event with geo-location information including the city, state, country, and latitude and longitude. Events may be displayed on a world map and rules may be created that include geographical context. For example, the AccelOps application can alert IT if an iPad, iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry device logs into the corporate network from a location where the company does not do business. AccelOps can trigger a script to automatically disconnect the device from the network, thereby avoiding potential security breaches.

"Our research consistently supports the fact that IT organizations that operate with cross-domain management capabilities routinely outperform those that still limit themselves to siloed views," said Dennis Drogseth, Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates. "AccelOps is staking a valuable leadership position by combining strong infrastructure, security, and service management in a single cohesive package that empowers organizations to adopt a more integrated and service-aware vision for managing their entire IT infrastructure."