Cloud hosting provider Linode launched Longview Apps, its new virtual server statistics collection and graphing service extension apps for performance analysis. The new apps provide systems administrators with the metrics and analytics they need to avoid crippling logjams and downtime–all to keep the virtual server running at peak performance.

Longview from Linode tracks important indicators for CPU, memory, network, process, and provides real-time graphics that can help identify and head off performance problems. Longview can be used to monitor any virtual server or  computer running Linux–including non-Linode system. Longview features include up to one minute each system information, open source client application, scaling graphics context data, and process statistics, including CPU, memory and IO use.

The Longview Apps suite now extends Longview capabilities with graphical dashboard of up-to-the-minute Apache, MySQL, and Nginx resource and performance metrics. With Longview Apps, system administrators can manage system and application resources, tune MySQL queries, troubleshoot application slowdowns, and reduce risk. In addition, Longview apps can provide up-to-the-minute metrics like requests/sec, worker counts, network throughput, queries/sec, and slow queries. These information can then be used to manage system and application resources, tune MySQL queries, troubleshoot application slowdowns, and much more.

“Longview Apps demonstrate Linode’s continued efforts to provide the tools our developer community and customers need to ensure their servers and apps are running at peak performance,” said Linode Founder and CEO Christopher Aker. “Administrators no longer have to dig through mountains of log files or interpret cryptic system and application metrics. Longview Apps allows them to easily enhance the Web and application user experience with faster performance, and plan for the future.”

Gartner estimates that 60% of server workloads will be virtualized by 2014. In short, it is their performance that dictates how user experience will be with the web and applications. The Longview Apps expand the insights that systems administrators have at the systems level, giving them the statistics they need to make informed decisions and plan accordingly for future events with an easy-to-use, beautiful dashboard. From end users point of view, it means amazing efficiency and no downtime.

The other benefits cited for Longview Apps include the ability for administrators and developers to collaborate to troubleshoot sluggish server and Web application response; query, create, delete, insert and update MySQL queries and tune slow MySQL queries to improve user experience; estimate future resource needs and scale resources; test and analyze new application code and system configurations; and record all systems and application activity to investigate ongoing performance issues.

The basic Longview Apps are free and provide 12 hours of data retention. The company also offered a more powerful, yet affordable enhanced version called Longview Pro in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS distributions.