10gen, the sponsor of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, announces today that its MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) will now be available for free to all users. During beta the tool, a fully hosted hosted service including a dashboard, was available only to 10Gen’s enterprise clients. 10gen president tk says that there will be no limit to the number of clusters free users can monitor with the tool, or any other limitations, but the company may eventually offer some premium tools for paying customers.

According to 10gen’s announcement, the service “auto discovers MongoDB nodes and securely transmits important metrics including memory usage, data base connections, index misses, read and write operations, memory consumption and CPU usage – providing alerts when failure situations are detected.”

One company already using the product is Monster.com. 10gen quotes Ray Howell, VP of architecture at Monster.com saying: “After adding MMS to our cluster, 10gen’s engineers detected an anomaly in our production deployment and proactively reached out to us to fix the problem before it became a production incident. We didn’t even have to file a ticket.”

Earlier this month 10gen announced a new $20 million round of funding, along with the release of MongoDB 2.0.

Services Angle

Monitoring-as-a-Service is heating up, with Spiceworks, Netuitive, Prelert and Nodeable now on the scene. Each of these services is trying to make monitoring simpler, from installation and configuration to the actual task of keeping an eye on dashboards and alerts. It’s yet another example of things moving out from behind the firewall and into the cloud.