With Google's launch of its first Chrome OS-powered "Chromebooks", IT monitoring software provider Opsview has warned that such devices are going to create a new set of IT monitoring challenges which will ultimately include developer-related issues.

The launch of Chromebooks highlights the growing trend towards more applications and services being delivered from the cloud. With many of these new services being hosted for application testing purposes in the public cloud, developers have been attracted by the opportunity to sandbox in an off-premise environment now that cloud-driven virtual machine instances can be spun up and initiated in literally seconds.

"Today we can see some compelling business arguments for cloud-based devices such as the Google Chromebook. In the future, we could see developers using them as a means to access development services in the cloud; however, I would suggest that it is a young and unproven strategy," said James Peel, product manager at Opsview.

"Consequently, organizations need effective IT monitoring tools which can provide them with automated and timely service-level reporting, which can give them real insight into IT performance. This can also help ensure that they are getting value for money from their service provider."

Opsview also comments on organizations now needing a fresh approach to the manner in which they monitor and manage their IT infrastructure. For instance, IT and project managers that oversee teams of developers are now monitoring less physical infrastructure as services are being developed using PaaS (Platform as a Service).

"The transition to such services raises the importance of network monitoring in particular, as it is vital to monitor the end-to-end performance from the developers' perspective but at the same time have the visibility to see if your service provider is meeting their service-level commitments," said Opsview's Peel.