Why you might want Stackdriver to watch your cloud infrastructure for you

Stackdriver thinks you need to know more — a lot more — about what’s going on in your IT infrastructure so you can avoid performance degradation and other snafus. To that end it’s positioning itself as a sort of New Relic of cloud infrastructure, according to founders Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri. The two are VMware(s vmw) vets and are bringing their enterprise IT credibility to an array of customers — some startups, some established older companies — all of which are developing cloud-first applications.

Much as New Relic monitors what’s shaking in customers’ application stacks, Stackdriver says it keeps a watchful eye on the critical infrastructure underlying those applications using data supplied by the cloud providers’ APIs along with its own agents deployed throughout customer infrastructure. That gives them a bunch of data points to pinpoint nascent problems before they get out of hand.

This whole notion proactive — and…