Cloudkick Blog: "...we've just hit 1,000,000 servers registered all-time in Cloudkick."
Those statements aren't even close to equivalent. The HN guidelines say it well:
Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site,
submit the latter.
I would really love to use them to monitor all of our servers but their current plans don't work for us. We use lots of tiny instances and virtual machines. This means for us the cost of Cloudkick for each VM would be around the actual monthly cost of that VM.
If you have are in a different position to myself and are using larger instances then I would recommend you give them a try!
That costs us $20/month, except we're doing it on a server that was already required for another service and had plenty of disk and CPU to spare, so ... really it costs us nothing, and gives us most of CloudKick's features, in our specific case.
Given their pricing, I think I'd rather take that money each month and pay someone to contribute to Nagios instead. :-/
But if we weren't on a tight budget (we're bootstrapped) I would have gone with something like CloudKick no doubt.
The server for Nagios might be cheap, but installing, refining and updating our monitors does take time that could be used on developing our product instead.
I don't mind paying for Saas (and pay many thousands a month for all sorts of services), but this is ridiculous:
https://www.cloudkick.com/pricing/
I love how the page suggests that the $949/month plan is somehow the 'default'. :)
We have it linked in with PagerDuty now as well.
I don't know that they're wrong, and I'm right, exactly, but it feels like they're all trying to paper over the features and drawbacks of cloud, and making it act more like traditional hardware that people are more familiar.
What advantage would switching to CloudKick give us???
I'm sure you were trying to point out that perhaps Azure doesn't meet your criteria for IaaS (yet). But, I think CloudKick offers many services that are possible to work with Azure right now.
Full VM access is just around the corner and people will be shopping for CloudKick types services very soon. My company is ready to be your first Azure customer.