Axibase is a US company founded in 2004 that develops sophisticated reporting.
Its flagship product, Fabrica, turns availability and performance data coming from all sort of IT assets, including entire Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs), into Microsoft Visio diagrams that update in real-time.
Fabrica works with HP OpenView Operations (OVO), IBM Tivoli Monitoring, HP Network Node Manager (NNM) and Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).
The company just entered the cloud computing market with a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) monitoring solution that is hosted on Amazon EC2 and reports about Amazon EC2.
Called Cloud Reporter, this solution is able to track resource usage inside the Amazon Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud and report about the Amazon Virtual Images (AMIs), the Relational Database Service (RDS), the Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) and the Elastic Block Store (EBS).
Axibase is able to track the EC2 resources thanks to the Cloudwatch web service that Amazon offers.
The reporting engine, which can be customized to generate any sort of custom report, is able to correlate multiple events happening across the entire infrastructure.
For instance, it can track and report about the CPU usage before and after AMIs upgrades or guest operating systems patching.
Reports can be seen online or can be received by email in plain text or with PDF attachments.
Axibase is adopting a pay-per-use pricing model, charging the amounts below per machine-hour consumed for each running instance:
Axibase offers a data retention of 5 years, allowing extended forecasts and a more accurate capacity planning. Part of this activity is automated so the platform autonomously suggests which AMIs are likely to run out of resources in the immediate future.
Last but not least, Cloud Reported tracks changes happening inside EC2, keeping a change log that is critical to perform root-cause analysis.
Overall, the product is extremely interesting and Axibase is exploring a completely new market segment. The company’s blog offers a good example of how Cloud Reporter can be used.
The company launched a public beta of Cloud Reporter at the end of June. The product is free until September 1st.