Instrumental

New Features: Alert Management Upgrades

Over the past few months, we’ve been steadily upgrading Instrumental’s alert management features! We’ve improved the overall user interface to make working with alerts faster and easier and added new features, such as:

Monitoring AWS Lambda with Instrumental

We recently launched our CloudWatch integration, which brings your CloudWatch data into the same monitoring environment as your application metrics, service metrics, and uptime monitoring. Most of our infrastructure is in AWS, so this is a great feature for us; hopefully you’ll like it too!

New Feature: Super-Fast CloudWatch Integration

While Instrumental offers broad support and integrations for application, server, service, and custom monitoring, certain AWS data is only available within the AWS CloudWatch service. Over the past few months, we’ve been testing a deep integration with CloudWatch and are excited to release it to all users.

Free Application & Server Monitoring + New Metered Pricing

We’ve updated Instrumental’s pricing to be fully metered and we replaced our 30-day trial with an entirely free Development Plan. While Instrumental’s pricing has been usage-based for a long time, this new model eliminates our plans and minimum spend requirements. With no minimum monthly spend, Instrumental is now a much better fit for smaller projects.

Free Application & Server Monitoring + New Metered Pricing

Amazon Kinesis: the best event queue you’re not using

Instrumental receives a lot of raw data, upwards of 1,000,000 metrics per second. Because of this, we’ve always used an event queue to aggregate the data before we permanently store it.

New Features: Graph Descriptions & Creation Metadata

We’re excited to announce two improvements to Instrumental that’ll make it easier to understand the context of your application and server monitoring graphs.

New Features: Graph Descriptions & Creation Metadata

What to Expect When You’re Expecting Failure

Instrumental is a key piece of infrastructure for many businesses, including Instrumental!  We put significant effort into making sure that Instrumental customers can rely on us to be accurate, available, and consistent, but no system is perfect.  There are two key components of our approach to reliability:

What to Expect When You’re Expecting Failure

Server & Application Monitoring Pricing Comparison: Instrumental, New Relic, Datadog, Librato, and SignalFx

Best Practices for Deprecating and Removing an API

Best Practices for Deprecating and Removing an API

A few weeks ago, our alert klaxons started blaring (alert notifications – we don’t really have klaxons, but maybe we should). We had a massive spike in failed background jobs. With the scale of data processing at Instrumental, a few minutes of background jobs is potentially hundreds of millions of data points. Our internal monitoring quickly proved that while our data pipeline was safe, all our API calls to Intercom were failing. Intercom had removed a critical API call we used to manage our customer service and product marketing. Our on-call team was forced to drop everything, and begin writing, testing, and deploying an emergency fix across all our products.

Monitoring for Docker, MongoDB, Redis and more!

Upgraded Feature: Time Navigation

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. Well, now you can!

Upgraded Feature: Time Navigation

How to Monitor a Background Job Queue: Age vs Depth

How to Monitor a Background Job Queue: Age vs Depth

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.

New Features: Read-Only Users + Multiple Admins

You 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).

New Features: Read-Only Users + Multiple Admins