Operations professionals benefited from crossfire between two of the public cloud’s biggest names this week as the fight over enterprise workloads shifted to the monitoring front. Amazon fired the opening salvo with the launch of a deployment tracker aimed at providing increased administrative visibility.

Upon initialization, AWS Config creates a snapshot of an environment and the relationships among the different components inside. From there on, changes to that original layout are automatically recorded and sent to a user-specified repository in the form of a consolidated data file every six hours. While fairly simple, that functionality offers crucial insights for complicated setups where services rely upon one another in a spiderweb of dependencies.

If something breaks, a practitioner can leverage Config to track down changes made in the same time frame and quickly identify the root cause. The ability to track activity is especially useful for large enterprise deployments with multiple administrators, the main use scenario that Amazon is targeting with the service. It’s also valuable for meeting compliance requirements.

Config is designed with third party monitoring solutions in mind. The raw data from the service can be funneled to a number of popular tools, including Splunk and CloudCheckr, for deeper analysis. The integration underscores Amazon’s efforts to provide customers with freedom of choice, something that the competition is taking just as seriously.

While the retail giant offers users the ability to stream logs into their preferred tools, Google is pushing interoperability to an entirely new level by making its cloud capabilities available on rival platforms – including Amazon Web Services. The company has implemented that approach with great success with Kubernetes and now hopes to replicate the strategy for PerfKit Benchmarker, the performance monitoring framework that it introduced the day after Config hit general availability.

The open-source tool joins two other application tracking services that Google introduced in the past month, the newer of which also extends support to competing clouds. PerfKit pulls data on key metrics such as throughput, latency, variance and overhead to provide what the search giant describes as a full view of provisioning times, which can be visualized using a complementary component called PerfKit Explorer.

The add-on packs a selection of ready-made dashboards based on standard benchmarks meant to save users the hassle of manually inputting their data. The search giant says that the technology can help administrators determine how their applications run in the cloud and optimize their environments accordingly.

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