Hyperic has built cloud monitoring into its core Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0 system. It can monitor the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud alongside traditional data center's Web applications.

When used to monitor the cloud, Hyperic itself becomes a cloud service. "It's the pay by the drink model," said Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic, noting its charges are based on hours of use.

Users of the Amazon compute cloud will find a version of Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0 installed and available for use as a service in the cloud by the end of the month. It will be installed as an Amazon Machine Image, a virtual machine file format based on Xen, and made available on Amazon's DevPay service.

Hyperic offers both Hyperic HQ 4.0 as open source code available today for free download from www.hyperic.com and a paid, subscription version called Hyperic HQ Enterprise 4.0.

Cloud users will be charged an initiation fee, then cloud hourly computing rates to activate the Enterprise edition. Soltero estimated a user of 25 servers in the cloud might be charged $300 a month to monitor them with HQ 4.0, depending on how many cloud metrics they wished to use. A larger user of 300 servers might be charged about $2,500 a month, he said.

With cloud monitoring available, data center operations teams will have the means to match their fluctuating demand picture to their own resources. If demand isn't being met by the data center, additional resources can be brought on line in the cloud to support operations, and then be decommissioned when no longer needed, he said.

Hyperic HQ 4.0 has been given additional features for on-premises Web application monitoring.

An automated discovery process in HQ 4.0 finds and registers new software resources. HQ 4.0 offers a new process of server cloning, which allows configuration profiles, security and services checks to be applied immediately to a cloned server. Rules for warning of performance degradation can also be applied within a minute, Soltero said.

HQ 4.0 monitors both VMware and Citrix XenServer virtual machines as well as physical servers.

In other Hyperic news, Soltero announced that Matthew Stodolnic, former VP of interactive marketing at Salesforce.com, joined Hyperic recently in the newly created position of VP of marketing. Stodolnic had been with Salesforce.com for seven years.

To further understand how Hyperic, Amazon, and other companies large and small are approaching cloud computing, InformationWeek has published an independent report on the subject. Download the report here (registration required).

The story was edited on 11/13 to clarify Matthew Stodolnic's title.