Today we’re launching a big upgrade to Instrumental’s time navigation. Before, Instrumental always showed data relative to now, and graphs would always update with new data. That’s great for every-day use. But sometimes, like during incident investigation and root cause analysis, it’s really useful to look at specific start/end dates and times. Read More
Many developers analyze background job queues too simply: queues are either too full (bad) or mostly empty (good). This is a dangerous perspective, especially at scale. To get the full picture of your queue’s health, you need to measure both queue depth and job age.
Queue depth is the common metric for measuring a queue’s health. Read More
We’ve recently added two features that will make it easier for you to manage user roles across your organization.
Read-only UsersYou can now invite users with read-only permissions. They’ll be able to see all graphs, metrics, and alerts, but not create, edit or delete them. This role is perfect for trusted partners and less-technical team members (like your CEO). Read More
When looking for a new APM tool, you’ll want to closely consider the following options:
Instrumental aggregates all data to a 60 second resolution. We store that data for at least 13 months. Let’s break that down:
Aggre-what?
Aggregation is what we do with data points sent to us more frequently than once per time period. Read More
Today we’re launching a much improved project navigation.
We used to show all your projects in the sidebar, but that got pretty unruly if you had many projects. Starting today, the sidebar only includes your favorited projects (plus the current project, of course.) How do you favorite projects? Check out the new Instrumental navigation menu! Read More
We’re firm believers that developers at product companies should focus on core business problems. We try to off-load the development, and maintenance, of most non-product related technology to a cloud provider. For example, just as we’d suggest you let Instrumental handle your application monitoring, we would rather let someone else host and maintain our WordPress blog. Read More
One of the best parts about running a service devoted to monitoring is that we get to talk to lots of folks near and dear to our hearts: System Administrators. When we do, we tell them about our Instrumental Tools monitoring software, that lets them start capturing server metrics in seconds. Read More
At Instrumental, we use a lot of AWS’s services, and sometimes we find its dark corners. S3 had some downtime today, limited to the region us-standard. There hasn’t been a public post-mortem yet, but we’d like to share why we switched away from it and why you should, too.
Many teams use us-standard as their default region. Read More
As “The Cloud” continues to assert itself as the primary way companies manage their technology infrastructure, it’s worth asking if the software you need to monitor that infrastructure should change to match. In most cases the answer is yes, but maybe not in the way you’re expecting.
The biggest difference between traditional data center infrastructure and the cloud is flexibility. Read More
Here’s a pro-tip for you when you record metrics on Instrumental: anything that can be a gauge, should be a gauge.
Why is that? You can use the Instrumental Query Language to get increment data, because we record the number of times we receive your gauge calls.
Let’s say you’re recording the time it takes to complete one request on your server when a user signs up, but you also want to know how often that is happening. Read More
