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
According to a post in the AWS forum, this issue was fixed sometime in 2016. You can safely ignore the below! (but you should check out Instrumental’s application and server monitoring while you’re here)
At Instrumental, we use a lot of AWS’s services, and sometimes we find its dark corners. 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
You can now copy and paste any graph URL, and be sure that when someone clicks it they’ll see the same thing as you. This always worked once you’d saved a graph, but now we continuously update the URL for every graph. This means you can share a graph as soon as you create it without cluttering up your project. Read More
Timely and relevant alerts are a key component of effective application monitoring, and we’ve done a lot of work recently to improve our alerts. Let’s dig in and talk about the improvements we’ve made!
The first thing you’re likely to notice are the improvements to your alerts configuration page.
From here, you’ll see a list of all your alerts. Read More
Deciding what to measure is hard, and even daunting at first. There’s a ton of code in your project and you don’t want to just slap a gaggle of useless metrics in there. Your measurement should mean something, dammit! On the other hand, it would be nice if it didn’t take forever to get started :)
Don’t worry – getting started doesn’t have to take forever. Read More