After almost 12 months of design and development, I am proud to announce the general availability of HQ 4.0!

Now past its 5th year of production usage, it’s incredibly cool for me to see how this product has evolved from what we conceived back in 2002. With the help of hundreds of customers and thousands of users, we’ve been able to stay focused on two key themes that drive everything we build into our product:

1- the desire to build products that help people manage large scale web environments
2- the desire to build products that do not create new problems while attempting to solve old ones

HQ 4.0 represents a big step forward for both of those themes. HQ 4.0 provides unique levels of visibility into every aspect of web applications and then uses that visibility to offer insight into diagnosing complex issues from virtualization layers all the way up the stack, forecast capacity requirements, and helping operations teams get reliable, detailed notification of problems before they create a crisis. HQ 4.0 also delivers these benefits alongside a whole new set of automation capabilities including extended, open API’s, UI automation workflows, and automatic agent upgrading. In a time when the demands of data center operations teams increase while resources are scarce, we want to make sure our technology helps people manage more with less.

4.0 also represents Hyperic’s continued commitment to innovation in the management space. 4.0 introduces the worlds first web application management solution designed and packaged natively for the Amazon AWS cloud. HQ for AWS is packaged as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which leverages technology like Elastic Block Storage to provide a fully cloud-enabled solution that can be deployed as easily as any other EC2 AMI out there. It also provides the first cloud-friendly management agent which allows users to manage cloud based virtual machines securely and reliably from either inside the cloud, or from HQ 4.0 installations inside your datacenter. Our good friend John Willis wrote up his impressions on the importance of this new development in HQ’s architecture on his blog.

CloudStatus.com, our free cloud monitoring service is actually built on HQ 4.0 and has been running inside EC2 since inception. We use this experience to build the coolest, richest monitoring and management product for companies looking to deploy production web applications inside AWS. Over the next few weeks we’ll be announcing innovative pricing plans for users of this HQ 4.0 for AWS and additional management features aimed at letting HQ 4.0 users leverage the benefits of all Amazon Web Services as part of their applications.

Thanks again to all our developers, customers, and community members for helping us create this very exciting release.