Rackspace Cloud Monitoring:

What do you like best?

Rackspace's monitoring has everything that we need for basic to intermediate monitoring and analytics. The UI is intuitive, and relatively painless to use and configure. The data presentation is adequate, and the ability to trigger alerts is a useful, and integral function. I do prefer using their API for configuring it, opposed to the GUI. The ability to monitor applications is quite useful (namely MySQL).

What do you dislike?

While the GUI is functional, it lacks any sort of batch configuration. If you want to monitor 5 different stats on a system, you have to go through the page-by-page setup for that metric - I feel this could be streamlined. It'd also be nice to be able to configure profiles for system types - rather than have to configure all the metrics, and alarms each time a server is created. Also, the agent can be a pain to deal with if you create servers from saved images - typically you have to go remove the agent, and reinstall it or it'll mix metrics.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

This is our primary monitoring solution for our cloud servers. We use it to trigger PagerDuty alerts for system events, and malfunctions, and other system impacting events. There is no additional cost on top of the server fees for having this service, saving us the cost of using a third-party provider.