Rackspace has launched a new monitoring service intended for customers who want a closer look at their cloud infrastructure and how it works. Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is a service born out of Rackspace’s acquisition of Cloudkick back in 2010. The service will interface with Rackspace’s cloud but also with any other cloud infrastructure.

As more businesses move their critical applications and data into the cloud, it has become increasingly important for them to find ways to keep track of performance and assess efficiency. Rackspace Cloud Monitoring is an attempt to satisfy that necessity.

Features for the service include the ability to monitor websites in general, keeping track of ports, protocols, and services, while also sending alerts to customers’ computers or mobile devices when necessary. Beyond those standard monitoring features, however, is a customizable API, a system that automatically scales as infrastructure grows, and even a command line client called Raxmon for those who need it (or prefer it) in addition to the graphical interface. Rackspace intends to add more features as the service grows.

Rackspace CTO John Engates acknowledged that Cloud Monitoring may have similarities to other monitoring services like Pingdom but said that it has some unique advantages. “That provides some basic uptime availability monitoring through a web interface but it doesn’t really scale well to thousands of instances across clouds.”

Rackspace has fully embraced the open cloud, investing a great deal in its own OpenStack platform, a collaborative effort with NASA to create an open source cloud project, now supported by over 180 companies. As the company’s own website touts, “Open is better”. But in order to prove that motto to be true, Rackspace will need to build quality services around its open platform. Cloud Monitoring is one of many that the company will package for its customers.

Pricing for Rackspace Cloud Monitoring starts at $1.50 per check, per month, based on the number of monitoring zones a customer uses. The service is available to both hosting and cloud customers, although anyone who uses the service must sign up for a Rackspace cloud account.