A little over one month ago, cloud monitoring company Librato launched their composite metrics feature into public beta – enabling IT departments to visualise the result of mathematical transformations of their existing metrics.
The powerful new capability lets users gain rapid insights from the data they are collecting by specifying complex queries against real-time metrics. The output allows users to compare, transform and aggregate datasets in the same way that data-query languages enable the mining of data in a database or data centre.
The new feature has a clear real-world benefit; for instance, you could add up all the CPU usage values in your server cluster to a global value, or calculate the sum of all requests hitting your application by adding the different counts for status codes. This level of understanding is both wanted and needed by developers and system administrators.
Joseph Ruscio, CTO and Co-Founder of Librato, believes the offering is a big step forward for his company. “Data is only as valuable as the actionable insights you can surface from it” he said, “[This data] helps users to find the answers they need and quickly respond to any situation”.
The company has historically prided itself on their software’s early detection capability, with the flexible cloud-based platform letting businesses pinpoint issues in production before they become critical. The composite metrics feature further minimises the time required to find the root cause of a problem by directly visualising sophisticated queries that span multiple inputs. To help make interpretation of those results as simple as possible, the composite metrics can then be saved in instruments and correlated with native metrics in the same instrument.
The new feature has been well received by existing customers. Weston Jossey, DevOps Manager of Tapjoy commented “Composite metrics was another great piece in the puzzle for us, especially when looking into how we were performing against historic metrics”, while Rhodri Pugh, Principal Developer of Scottish American added “We’re finding that composite metrics gives us the powerful and flexible language we need to rapidly diagnose and capitalise on the varied data our systems constantly provide”.
Librato offer a thirty day free trial period, while offering two main products for most of their customers. The Developer version is free, but limits users to one hundred streams, one dashboard, ten alerts and three annotation streams. The Production version offers an unlimited amount of all the aforementioned features. The cost of the production version varies depending on what is being monitored. Librato predict that business intelligence monitoring will be around $10 per month, while operations monitoring could cost as much as $200 per month.
Have you used Librato? What importance could their latest feature hold in your business? Do you think custom metrics is a vital part of a holistic cloud monitoring solution? Let us know in the comments below.
By Daniel Price
Post Sponsored By Librato
