Monitoring is becoming increasingly important for organizations as they expand beyond the firewall to the cloud in pursuit of cost savings and enhanced management flexibility. But there’s a catch: the many benefits of the hybrid cloud add complexity, making it more difficult for IT organizations to identify and resolve technical issues.

Zenoss is tackling this trade-off with Service Impact, a tool for mapping application and service dependencies across physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructure. According to the company, the solution provides admins with a “holistic view of application and service health that speeds up root cause analysis and facilitates prioritization of repair.”

Announced this morning, the latest version of the solution reportedly provides a 300 percent improvement in event processing throughput to accelerate troubleshooting in large-scale IT environments. Service Impact also features a new deployment option for distributed networks, improved scalability and a set of self-service tutorial videos for admins.

“The key to effectively managing the performance and availability of applications in today’s highly dynamic data center is service context,” explained Alan Conley, the CTO of Zenoss. “Applications rely on underlying services for reliable operation, and those services depend on individual compute, storage, and network resources to run properly. Our real-time service models connect the dots between applications and infrastructure to make precise root cause analysis possible.”

Service Impact is a part of Zenoss Service Dynamics, the vendor’s flagship unified monitoring suite. The software was recently updated with a streamlined ETL process, a reorganized schema and a revamped business intelligence engine that supports in-memory columnar queries. The release also introduced data mining and filtering capabilities, a new RESTful API for integration with front-end analytics tools and additional graph libraries.