Cloudian is making the basic monitoring tool available to customers for free, while the in-depth analytics has a modest fee for its use.

Object storage vendor Cloudian has announced HyperIQ, a monitoring and observability solution that also brings predictive maintenance and user analytics to make customers’ Cloudian infrastructure easier to maintain and to manage. It comes in two versions, with the detailed analytics being an add-on to the free monitoring capability.

“We already had our management console and Smart Support, which is a call- home solution,” said  Sanjay Jagad, Senior Director of Products and Solutions at Cloudian. “That’s what our customers have been using to manage infrastructure. The issue though is that as object storage environments get larger and larger we are constantly being told that we need a way to visualize information in an easy and dynamic way.”

Cloudian’s answer to that is HyperIQ, which manages Cloudian storage and related infrastructure both on-prem and in hybrid cloud environments from a single interface.

HyperIQ features intelligent storage and user analytics, along with health checks, that enable predictive maintenance, enhanced security and resource optimization.

“This is an out of the box solution that collects data from our nodes to bring intelligent monitoring,” Jagad said. “The monitoring is important, but that’s not the only value here, because HyperIQ can be applied for predictive maintenance and user analytics.”

The predictive maintenance includes proactive alerts for predicting hardware failures, assessing maintenance needs, and avoiding performance impacts, while the user behavior analytics allows monitoring of user activities, providing insights into usage patterns such as uploads, downloads, API usage, S3 transactions, request sizes and HTTP response codes, and enforcing security and compliance policies.

“It was always possible to get this monitoring and analysis information before, but it was a lot of work, and you would likely have to connect the dots manually,” said Jon Toor, Cloudian’s CMO. “Because we are scale-out, it means some customers have 60-70 nodes and that means there’s a lot going on, and the networking becomes part of your system. HyperIQ allows for a high level of monitoring and analysis across this environment, so you can take action if something bad is happening.”

Toor emphasized that while there is lots of analytics software out there, HyperIQ’s purpose-built design for Cloudian HyperStore gives a deeper level of insight.

“Other tools don’t provide these insights because this has a view inside the system, to see what users are using what data,” he said. “It’s hard to get that depth using something like a Splunk tool.”

The monitoring provides real-time pre-configured interactive dashboards and historical data, and also allows building user-specific flexibility to build unique dashboards from over 100 available data panels

“You can create customer configurable alerts, and receive them though your choice of collaboration tool,” Jagad said.

HyperIQ also includes a monthly health check to ensure a system remains optimally configured and follows best practices.

“Our SmartSupport team now does a health tech, a structured monthly review and provides a live conversation with a Customer Success engineer,” Jagad stated. “This is another differentiator for us.”

Cloudian sees HyperIQ as a strategic solution for channel partners.

“It will help them close business,” Toor said. “It exposes what’s going on by making everything under the hood easy to see.

“This builds on partners’ value as a trusted advisor, and lets them work with customers on regular health checks,” Jagad said. “Since this is integrated into the ecosystem, resellers can also use this knowledge to tune it for best applications and workflows, and make sure it’s customized for the customer’s workload.”

Two versions of HyperIQ are now available as a virtual machine for download – basically with or without the advanced analytics

HyperIQ Basic provides the core monitoring with the pre-configured dashboards and is free with a HyperStore license.

HyperIQ Enterprise, which includes advanced analytics features, is licensed by capacity at 0.025 cents per GB per month, including support, which translates into $3000 per PB annually.

“It’s not a big cost, especially for the value that it brings to the customer,” Jagad said.