Days after launching a new service for tracking the performance of applications running on its public cloud, Google is rolling out another monitoring option that takes the fight against Amazon to an entirely new front: the retail giant’s own platform.

Google Cloud Monitoring is based on technology that the search giant obtained through the acquisition of an operations analytics provider called Stackdriver Inc. in May of last year, the terms of which were not disclosed. The service implements most of the capabilities Google gained in the deal, according to the official blog post that announced the launch on Wednesday. It provides a view of both the application itself and the underlying scaffolding that supports it.

Extending that visibility are advanced features such as the ability to create custom dashboards to accommodate teams and practitioners with different areas of responsibility, which is especially useful in enterprise-scale deployments. There is also a notification system that makes it possible to alert people when a component under their management becomes unavailable or certain metrics move outside acceptable ranges.

Taken together with Trace, the homegrown performance tracker that Google introduced earlier this week, the service largely levels the playing field against Amazon on the crucial application monitoring front. Organizations now have a much more even choice between building their application on either platform, but that’s just one aspect of the move.

The other is more strategic. Google Cloud Monitoring only works with the search giant’s services on launch, but that will change with time. Plans are already in place to leverage the cross-provider compatibility of Stackdriver’s technology for integration with Amazon Web Services, an effort that reflects growing enterprise interest in hybrid environments.

That focus is also the reason  Google decided to release its container orchestration engine, Kubernetes, under an open-source engine instead of making the technology exclusive to its platform.

Project head Craig McLuckie explained the rationale to SiliconANGLE in a September interview, saying that supporting competing clouds provides the search giant with access to much a bigger market than just its own infrastructure customers.

The same reasoning underlies the decision to add support for Amazon Web Services. Google is trying to position itself as the linchpin for the multi-cloud enterprise environments of the future, a strategy that will presumably see it add monitoring support for even more competing platforms. It’s also likely that Google will introduce additional provider-agnostic solutions as part of that effort, which should make for an exciting year.

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