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Google spurns Azure, sucks up to AWS with Stackdriver console

Redmond's cloud not that popular, says web giant's Brian Stevens

GCP Next Google has been showing off the Stackdriver cloud monitoring tool it opened in beta at the start of the year, and it's bad news for Microsoft.

The Stackdriver software allows IT managers to monitor traffic, notifications, and diagnostic functions for both Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) simultaneously, but not for Azure. Brian Stevens, VP of cloud platforms at Google, said that Microsoft shouldn't hold its breath on integration.

"We've made no decision on integrating Microsoft as yet," he told The Reg at the post-keynote press conference at GCP Next 2016 in San Francisco.

"When we reviewed our customer base for this, very few were running Azure, with most sticking to GCP and AWS. It's more likely that we'll focus on bringing virtual machine functions to Stackdriver before integrating Azure."

That's bad news for Microsoft, since Stackdriver looks to be very popular with IT managers. The code allows the monitoring of applications across multiple cloud runtime environments from Google and Amazon, and allows users to search for log errors in both systems within a single pane.

Google touted Stackdriver's "intelligent interface," which is a fancy way of saying when you drill down into a problem in the logs, suitable performance metrics are automatically generated and displayed.

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Managers can configure the system to send out alerts for specified events, such as errors in the logs or when a cluster is reaching capacity. The software can work with AWS's alerting tools in the same manner, and also works with messaging products like PagerDuty and Slack.

But this is Google's code, so the Chocolate Factory has made it possible to integrate other code from the company into Stackdriver. This includes sending logs to BigQuery for analysis and Google Cloud Datalabs for visualisation.

Stackdriver is still in beta, but on launch will be a service hosted by Google, which will handle all the backend integration. No pricing figures have been announced. ®

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