One of the core predicates to true enteprise cloud computing is manageability. Enterprise IT organizations don’t like surprises, especially the kind that start with an executive calling them about an application failure before they know about it. That’s why services like Tap In Systems are going to be critical to enterprise cloud adoption.
Tap In Systems is still in private beta at this point, and according to CEO Peter Loh they are making some changes to the system before expanding the beta in the near future. They are actively seeking beta customers as well, particularly from enterprise organizations. Their beta today has only a few customers, and most are what Loh termed “Web 2.0 companies.” He did reference an unnamed enterprise customer in the beta running a “core application” with 200 EC2 instances.
Tap In’s core value proposition starts with a simple question – “How can you solve a problem when you can’t determine where it exists?” Standard application management and monitoring solutions today cannot handle the dynamic IP and non-sensical naming of public cloud infrastructures like EC2. Tap In not only sees the performance of the system, but also knows the meta data of the instances – including configuration types, memory, and more.
They are also integrating with Amazon’s recently announced CloudWatch API and will be providing a lot of value beyond the core CloudWatch data. Analytics, visualization, and long-term archiving of CloudWatch data are some of the enhancements they are planning.
Of course, Amazon is not their only target cloud infrastructure. They also have deals with (or plans for this) with 3tera, GoGrid and RackSpace. Tap In is hoping to have the cloud providers OEM or resell their management tools to users.
Pricing is a reasonable $0.49 per hour of their server, and a single server can monitor 200 instances. This is a fairly inexpensive price for a system that provides peace of mind for large-scale cloud usage.
Tap In Systems is still very early, with only 5 employees and bootstrap / friends & family funding. It would seem like this could be a good venture-funding opportunity.
Here are some screen shots:
John Treadway 
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