Back in July, Intel launched its “Cloud for All” initiative aimed at foster inggreater enterprise adoption of public, private and hybrid clouds. Building on that effort, Intel last week said its open-sourcing a new tool called “Snap” that’s designed to help organizations gain better visibility into their cloud infrastructure.

In a press briefing announcing the news, Intel said that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for enterprises to keep a lid on all of the applications and infrastructure they’re running in the cloud.

“As workload scheduling and management becomes more advanced with the advent of software-defined infrastructure, access to the underlying platform capabilities and work states is critical. Data is the key to optimizing workload deployment based on performance and capability requirements. And this is where snap enters the picture.”

Intel describes Snap as a “plugable open-source platform telemetry framework” that’s able to gather and expose data about the underlying infrastructure within cloud environments. In a nutshell then, what Snap does is provide easily accessible information about a cloud’s performance and resources. Snap is designed to be compatible with numerous types of computing systems and storage platforms, and can work across clouds both large and small.

For Intel, such visibility becomes even more important when that cloud infrastructure is software-defined. That’s because software-defined infrastructure is usually abstracted from bare-metal resources, which makes it harder to identify and monitor resources based on the physical hardware.

“Snap-enabled software tools will give system integrators, operators, solutions providers, and the data center analytics ecosystem a much more comprehensive view of infrastructure capabilities, utilization, and events in real time — making full automation and orchestration of workloads across server, storage, and network resources a reality,” the chip maker said in its statement.

Intel has made the code for Snap available under an Apache 2.0 license on GitHub, and the company told eWeek that it’s hoping the tool will soon be embraced by a much larger open-source group.

“We’re one of the core members of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), so I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows up there in one form or another,” said Jonathan Donaldson, vice president and general manager of Software-Defined Infrastructure at Intel.

Intel announced snap at the Tectonic Summit in New York last week.

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