Open source management software provider Hyperic this week introduced an upgrade to its platforms that lets IT managers monitor virtual environments, better plan for capacity and track performance of services delivered via cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the talk of many industry analyst firms who argue the pay-per-use model for compute, storage and other resources will attract more enterprise customers in coming years. IDC, for one, forecasts that spending on cloud services will reach $42 billion in the next five years, capturing 12% of IT spending growth in 2012. Vendors such as Hyperic are building monitoring capabilities that can handle the dynamic nature of a cloud environment into their platforms now in anticipation of cloud adoption.

"Virtualization and cloud have changed the scope of how we do Web operations. Hyperic believes it is the biggest game changer we have seen in the market," says Stacey Schneider, senior director of marketing at Hyperic.

Hyperic Tuesday made available its HQ 4.0 application, which includes automated features that can keep pace with rapidly-changing virtual environments and cloud-based applications and services. The vendor focused its cloud monitoring capabilities in this release on Amazon Web Services and company officials say the company's experienced managing "private clouds" of more then 3,500 VMware and XenServer virtualization deployments.

"Companies are starting to adopt cloud technologies and use them as overflow for their data centers," Schneider says. "Hyperic HQ is providing a way to bridge the gap, smooth workflows and apply management rules to the cloud to get those applications and servers under control fast."

For instance, HQ 4.0 performs an inventory of software resources and identifies new items in the environment. Now after the auto-discovery registers the new resources, a new process of server cloning allows all configuration profiles for log data collection, security and service checks to be immediately applied. That ensures that all resources will be managed under the same policies, Hyperic says.

HQ software includes centralized management software installed on a server and requires agents be distributed to managed servers and other devices. The company also incorporated a server communication protocol so that agents monitoring external resources will initiate contact with the HQ server to meet security protocols and operate across firewalls.