Librato
![dan-kusnetzky.jpg](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/59afea5b1d9a56714a85941b25d6b762c1982a7b/2014/07/22/549e1e2e-1175-11e4-9732-00505685119a/dan-kusnetzky.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&frame=1&height=192&width=192)
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.