Rackspace Buys Server Management Platform Cloudkick

Hosting company Rackspace is acquiring Y Combinator-backed startup Cloudkick, which offers a full-fledged server management system to businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloudkick, which launched in early 2009, provides detailed graphs on the health of your servers, and tools to categorize and keep information about what each server is doing. Cloudkick serves more than 1,500 businesses from Fortune 500
enterprises to small startup and has seen more than 1 million servers pass through its tools.

Cloudkick’s dashboard allows you to easily add or remove servers from Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EC2, Linode, GoGrid, Slicehost, RimuHosting, and VPS.NET and then monitor an unlimited amount of instances. You can see all the servers in one place, and color-code and label each server.

One of the more compelling aspects of Cloudkick’s platform is that it will consistently check whether servers are alive and functioning and then alert you, via email, if servers go down. Cloudkick also provides data on bandwith and other metrics on servers in easy to use graphs and tables, allowing you a visual snapshot of server activity. You can also access servers straight from web and can run commands through your web browser remotely, which is handy when you are trying to manage servers from another computer.

Additionally, earlier this year Cloudkick <a href="“>launched premium features, which include load, CPU, bandwidth, and memory monitoring; advanced performance graphs and diagnostic performance. Prices range from $99 to $599 per month depending on the number of servers being tracked.

Clearly, Cloudkick’s platform is comprehensive, which makes its an attractive buy for a company like Rackspace. The hosting company plans to offer Cloudkick to its client base, but will also keep Cloudkick alive for its existing and future customers who are not Rackspace customers.

Rackspace, which is based in Texas, is also using the Cloudkick acquisition as a way to establish more of a presence in the Silicon Valley area. Powered by a staff of 12 employees, Cloudkick has raised $2.75 million in funding.