Hot on the heels of introducing a native load balancer to make it easier for customers to manage their computing workloads across virtual machines, DigitalOcean Inc. is augmenting its public cloud again in a bid to further improve usability.

The startup today rolled out a free monitoring service that can provide insight into the behavior of every virtual machine in an environment. According to DigitalOcean, the tool tracks a half-dozen metrics on launch, including resource utilization statistics such as the amount of the processing power and storage capacity that an instance uses as well as information about the processes running inside. The data is refreshed at one-minute intervals to let users stay on top of how their deployments are performing.

In the same spirit, DigitalOcean has equipped the service with a notification mechanism that can generate alerts when metrics cross a certain threshold. This feature should come in handy for identifying cost overruns and processes that are depriving infrastructure resources from other workloads. Moreover, the tool archives the data that it collects to let users check how utilization changes over time, which makes it possible to spot long-term problem patterns that are difficult to glean from isolated alerts.

Like the load balancer that DigitalOcean launched in February, the monitoring service is designed to spare developers the hassle of manually deploying a third-party solution in their environments. Both tools are the fruit of the company’s efforts to better accommodate production workloads that can only be managed efficiently with the support of automation tools.

Julia Austin, DigitalOcean’s chief technology officer, said that her team intends to deliver many more features in the coming year as part of this initiative. The roadmap includes improvements on the instance availability, security, data storage and networking fronts as well as planned enhancements to the new monitoring tool. DigitalOcean will need to find a way of broadening its platform’s appeal while still retaining simplicity.

Image: DigitalOcean