Librato

Joseph Ruscio, the Co-Founder/CTO of Librato, contacted me to introduce his new company. Joe and I had spoken when he was with EverGrid. Unfortunately, he caught me while I was moving and my office was in boxes and I was living out of a suitcase (they're rather small for someone of my size, by the way.)

Librato, I was told, is offering a couple of products to help IT administrators with application performance monitoring challenges. The company offers Librato Silverline — a tool designed to help customers monitor and manage applications, and Librato Metrics — a platform for storing, visualizing, analyzing and acting on any kind of time-series (read monitoring) data that's important to users. If we consider a future in which these busy IT folks are trying to keep track of thousands of systems, networking components, storage servers, and a herd of mobile devices, simple is good.

I was really impressed with the simplicity of Metrics during the demonstration. I could imagine a busy administrator being able to glance at a Metrics dashboard and know that things were going well. It would be just as easy to conduct a deep dive into the numbers if something was going wrong.

Librato has some interesting capabilities, but I have seen similar demonstrations presented by BMC, CA, HP, IBM and a number of other suppliers of application performance management tools. While Librato's products offer lovely, easy-to-use graphic interfaces, some of the other suppliers appear to be offering much more comprehensive tools.

Visit Librato's site and see for your self. The company is offering a number of free trials of their products.