Whatever trace of doubt that there may have remained about Microsoft’s commitment to Linux in the open-source ecosystem is now likely gone following the addition of a free monitoring utility to its public cloud for tracking the activity of instances running the operating system. It’s the newest gesture in what is shaping up as a highly aggressive campaign to shake off past animosities.

Saying that Microsoft has historically had a mixed relationship with the open-source movement is putting it mildly. Under its past leadership, the company had the dubious honor of serving as the poster child for proprietary software, in no small part due to persistent denunciations of Linux from Steve Ballmer. But times have changed.

While its desktop presence is still negligible, Linux now powers a quarter of the world’s servers and a significantly greater portion of cloud environments. One of the most recent official estimates pegs its share of infrastructure-as-a-service market as three times that of Microsoft’s at roughly 75 percent, making the operating system an unignorable force even on the traditionally Windows-centric Azure.

The new monitoring functionality is an attempt to address that. It’s implemented in the form of an agent that administrators can install on their Linux instances to automatically aggregate more than 40 metrics encompassing processor, storage and network utilization along with common errors. That data is displayed in real-time on the Azure monitoring dashboard.

The agent also provides the option to steam statistics to command line utilities or third party performance tracking services, but it’s still potentially too little too late. Companies already have tools at their disposal to monitor their cloud-based Linux environments, some of which have the advantage of working with competing platforms, which Microsoft has yet to match.

In other words, the new monitoring agent isn’t about to displace existing alternatives anytime soon, although that’s not exactly what the company is aiming for either. Rather, the launch is part of a broader effort to accommodate Linux users that also extends to the private cloud, where Redmond recently revealed plans to add SSH support to its popular PowerShell command line interface. That will allow administrators to keep track of their Linux servers from Windows.

Photo via Cloudant