Amazon has had monitoring for their instances for a year now. The only change is in the way that they price it.
It used to be expensive enough that you wouldn't leave it on at all times, but would turn it on to diagnose something or check up on one of your boxes, then turn it back off when you were done. Now you get a baseline low-fi version for free.
I think they just realized that nobody was paying for this service, and that it really didn't cost them anything to provide it. So they just made it free.
As far as Startup Killing goes, I doubt this will hurt any "Cloud Monitoring" startups significantly. If you look at the 5 basic charts they give you, you can see it's in line with their stand on reporting across all their services: They give you the basics, but leave plenty of room for somebody else to step in and deliver something better.
It used to be expensive enough that you wouldn't leave it on at all times, but would turn it on to diagnose something or check up on one of your boxes, then turn it back off when you were done. Now you get a baseline low-fi version for free.
I think they just realized that nobody was paying for this service, and that it really didn't cost them anything to provide it. So they just made it free.
As far as Startup Killing goes, I doubt this will hurt any "Cloud Monitoring" startups significantly. If you look at the 5 basic charts they give you, you can see it's in line with their stand on reporting across all their services: They give you the basics, but leave plenty of room for somebody else to step in and deliver something better.