josephruscio

vision: (noun) the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom. (verb) imagine

Tailscale investor here. I can assure you we share the same vision with the founders.

Last player to have a batting average >.400 is what he's famous for but in the last few decades (as "Moneyball"-style analytics took over the sport) "on-base percentage" is now generally considered a better measure. Ted Williams is the all-time career leader with .4817 and led the league in it a record twelve times (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_... )

For Aurora/RDS Postgres there's https://www.citusdata.com/ or https://www.heroku.com/postgres

Librato founder and current Solarwinds employee here. Happy to answer any questions. Important to note that AppOptics is effectively a proper superset of Librato, internally it's powered by the same infrastructure and is API-compatible with Librato's newer "multidimensional" (i.e. tagging) data model that we launched just over a year ago. The "superset" is a huge swath of new capabilities per the email above.

Facebook attempted to buy Snapchat for $3B 3 years ago (http://mashable.com/2014/01/06/snapchat-facebook-acquisition...). Entrepreneurs should be plenty encouraged by that. Snapchat made the decision to compete with Facebook.

A couple thoughts from a Librato founder here:

- Appreciate the thorough and balanced approach you took here, there's a lot of great feedback, most of which helps validate our current roadmap and 1-2 things we'll certainly consider.

- The tradeoff of providing a true utility service where you only pay for what you use is that the actual makeup of your bill can become complex (think of your AWS bill). We do pro-rate usage to the hour right now (matching AWS), so unless your metric "lifetimes" are sub-hour there's shouldn't be a huge issue.

- There's a similar power/complexity tradeoff with rollups. Unlike some solutions that only rollup via average we track multiple summary statistics e.g. min, max, sum, count, weighted average. Managing the differences between these can be confusing in some cases, so we're currently working on a simpler interface to toggle between these. More details can be found here: https://www.librato.com/docs/kb/visualize/faq/rollups_retent...

- Mobile support is something we've been incrementally adding and will continue until it's complete e.g. the actual alerts page you land on from a notification is now mobile-ready.

- Tagging. In the years since we first launched (when AFAIK only OpenTSDB supported this) it's become clear that this is becoming more and more a standard capability. Which is why we've been building out a next-generation data-store, which supports indexed tagging and a bunch of other new capabilities. We expect it to be in beta this summer.

librato.com & papertrail.com, San Francisco CA

Librato and Papertrail recently joined forces with Pingdom as part of the Solarwinds Cloud family. We're respectively industry leaders in metrics and log/event management/analysis-as-a-Service. We process billions of events in real-time every day for tens of thousands of users with a small team of ~20 engineers.

We're looking to expand our engineering teams to help build the next generation of real-time IT analytics products. We're looking for great frontend engineers, data pipeline engineers, designers, etc. We're a modern shop that practices chatops and continuous delivery using tools like Slack, Github, Asana, AWS, Salt, etc

You can find a list of current openings at http://solarwinds.jobs/jobs/?q=librato+papertrail

It's AWS-style metered and billed monthly based on the number of time-series or "data streams" you're sending us.

Yup! We actually linked to that from the article as an example C implementation. It's really solid and also has a Librato backend ;-). We're already using it on a several high-throughput services internally and it will probably warrant it's own post in the future.

Librato - https://metrics.librato.com/jobs

jobs _at_ librato.com

San Francisco, CA or REMOTE

Librato is changing the way teams monitor/manage their production infrastructure. We've built a world-class platform and need talented individuals to join us in taking it to the next level! While we're headquartered in downtown San Francisco fully half of our team is spread across the continental U.S, and we care more about what you can do than where you live. If you have a passion for bridging the gap between raw data and actionable insights and are interested in one of the positions listed below, we want to talk!

Front End Developer - Data visualization, Coffeescript, jQuery

Operations Engineer - AWS, Chef, ChatOps, Continuous Delivery

Support Engineer

Developer Evangelist

Director of Marketing

If you're looking for something a little more packaged and not averse to installing a Ruby gem, this will manage multiple AWS accounts and allow you to ssh/scp using AWS instance IDs as the target: https://github.com/mheffner/awsam

It's ~7-10% amongst males depending on where you source your number.

Co-Founder/CTO at Librato here, just wanted to say thanks for the kind words, and include a link ;-): http://librato.com

You should check out Librato (I'm a co-founder), we let you define your own metrics and build dashboards: https://metrics.librato.com

Could not agree more. This is the approach we've strived to take while building https://metrics.librato.com ... API access for everything, integration with popular OSS for metric collection (e.g. statsd, collectd), loosely coupled integration with complementary tools (e.g. Papertrail, Pagerduty), etc.

I generally paraphrase this effect as such ;-): "There is no aberration detection mechanism more sophisticated than your marketing guy glancing at a dashboard while drinking his coffee."

Thanks for the feedback :). We do provide a defined set of rollups today: 1m, 15m, 1h ... but in the future we intend to let users configure that themselves. If you want to shoot me an email, we can chat about the realtime scenario, I'm always interested in testing our pricing hypothesis against real-world use-cases.

Dashboards provide value on multiple levels. They radiate information out into your team so everyone is working off of the same shared understanding about the state of the business. They make it easier to detect aberrations. They enable your experts to curate a set of top-level metrics on a per-service basis to look at first when fire-fighting. Every service in your architecture should have it's own dashboard.

If you're interested in dashboards, our startup recently launched a service that makes it simple to hook in your metrics through OSS tools like StatsD and build real-time dashboards with a few clicks: https://metrics.librato.com You just provide the data, we do all the rest. Would love any feedback you might have!

I think it's definitely competitive if you look across all the entrants in this space (or similar/adjacent) ones. That doesn't necessarily make us the lowest priced however ;-). Roughly speaking a million measurements costs $2.00 with our current list pricing. We do have progressive volume discounts (described in the FAQ) that kick in at higher measurement counts.

Appreciate the feedback (librato co-founder here), we should definitely make that clearer on the pricing page and elsewhere. We're in the process of adding some content around that now.

In short a measurement is a single datapoint i.e. <key, value, timestamp>. So if you have a sense of how many metrics you want to track and at what frequency, it's relatively straight-forward to calculate the list price. There's an estimator on the pricing page to help you do that once you understand what constitutes a "measurement".

Thanks! One more thing, right after hitting reply, I realized the numbers you saw sounded too high. So I checked out our pricing page and it turns out we had a regression in the estimator. 50 metrics reported every 60 seconds costs $4.46, not $26.78. For the $26.78 you can push 300 metrics every 60 seconds. Just pushed out a fix and it shows the correct values now, so this exchange was really helpful!

Sure thing! Our backend is horizontally scalable and triply redundant by design. We have a web tier behind an ELB that runs our API (http://dev.librato.com/v1/post/metrics). It's implemented in Sinatra today. We'll probably switch to something more performant in the future, but for now it's cheaper to throw more instances behind the load-balancer and spend our time building out more features in the service.

When metrics come into one of the API instances, they turn around and insert it into a Cassandra cluster that we're running spread across 3 different availability zones with an RF factor of 3, meaning your data is stored in 3 different availability zones.

The "GET" calls to pull data out of our service go through the same API, so as soon as data is written to the cluster, it can be pulled back out. Hence the marketing term "realtime".

I appreciate you taking the time to look over our marketing content and giving your frank opinion :-), no ill will perceived at all. It helps us to know where we need to improve our communication around the value we are providing. In that spirit, I'll take a brief stab addressing some of your concerns here:

1) Your time is the most expensive resource. The cost of hosting your own solutions is almost always dwarfed by the cost of time you spend configuring it, maintaining it, and recovering it in the face of failures. We provide the same value here as any SaaS team in any vertical. We care and manage for the infrastructure and are constantly developing and rolling out new features. Of course the time needed to invest depends on one's time and experience, but we intend to save a lot of people a lot of time.

2.) A small EC2 instance costs $61/month and has finite disk bandwidth (and CPU). You might get more than 50 metrics, but it's going to come up a lot short of "nearly unlimited". Most people I know running serious Graphite installations end up needing collocated physical hardware with SSD's. That's going to cost you more like $1K-$2K/month. You will still have a SPOF unless you double that cost. We handle all the scaling and reliability for you.

3) Our pricing is completely linear per the number of metrics, the steps in the slider are just to make it easier to chunk around different numbers. There are no step-wise increases that double your costs. I appreciate your comment here as it had not occurred to me that someone might (reasonably) infer a stepwise increase in pricing.

4) We also include other valuable tools like threshold-based alerting on all your data streams with GUI integration to 3rd party services like Campfire, PagerDuty, Email, Custom Webhooks, with more to come.

5) A lot of 'monitoring' companies are springing up these days because the market is clamoring for it ;-). While some teams would rather handle these things in-house, a lot of other teams would rather focus on building their core business value and out-source infrastructure head-aches. It's the same economics pushing teams to outsource version-control, logging, hosting, etc.

Another alternative is to consider a service that handles storage/visualization/alerting/etc for your time-series data. I work for a startup that does exactly that and there are other options in this space as well. Would love any feedback you guys might have: https://metrics.librato.com

Awesome to see this out in the open now :-).

In the spirit of sharing, here's our campfire bot developed in Ruby on top of the Scamp (https://github.com/wjessop/Scamp) framework: https://github.com/josephruscio/twke

May not have started it if the hubbers hadn't taken so long with hubot ;-).

Perhaps I'm assuming too much, but it looks like you might be confusing notification with queueing. As you found with SQS, queueing systems can make for poor notification mechanisms. Did you try using AWS SNS (http://aws.amazon.com/sns/) for your first two use cases? We have similar notification use-cases internally, and SNS has worked great.

San Francisco, CA - REMOTE, INTERN

Librato - http://librato.com is looking to hire a fifth engineer into our small team. We've building a great product for infrastructure monitoring/management with enthusiastic early adopters. As a ground-floor member of the company you’ll receive a competitive salary and a meaningful equity position:

https://silverline.librato.com/careers

I hack on the aforementioned Silverline at http://librato.com, and we provide system-level monitoring at the process/application granularity as-a-Service. (We also have a bunch of features around active workload management controls, but that's out of scope here). It actually works on any server running one of the supported versions of Linux, not just EC2. Benefits of going with a service-based offering are the same as in any other vertical, you don't need to install and manage your own software/hardware for monitoring.

Here's an example of the visualizations we provide into what's going on in your server instances: http://support.silverline.librato.com/kb/monitoring-tags/app...

Canonical maintains and updates their own AKIs for their official Ubuntu AMIs, which is what we're running in production. I suggest deferring to their judgement. Here's a full release history of the Ubuntu 10.04 server AMI's, note the changing AKIs and note that none of them are the default ones provided by Amazon:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/query/lucid/server/released.txt