Today we’re excited to announce a pair of new services from Scalyr:
Scalyr is a new approach to server monitoring and analysis. Traditionally, this has been treated as a series of special-case problems: timeseries/graphing, log search, external monitoring, dashboards, alerting, exception tracking, performance analysis, etc. In my career, I’ve had to juggle too many tools in an attempt to get a complete picture of a system’s behavior — and been frustrated at the disconnected, patchwork result. I’ve spent far too many hours trying to figure out which graph explains why my pager went off, or which logs might help me understand why an error graph just spiked, or taking random peeks into log files because I don’t have a tool that can analyze them in the way I need.
Scalyr is a unified, enlightened solution for understanding server behavior. At its heart is a data warehouse for event streams. The warehouse can accept traditional data types such as timeseries data or log files, as well as structured data such as exception reports or custom events. All this can then be searched, graphed, histogrammed, and otherwise analyzed. You can define log parsing rules to extract structured data from unstructured logs, and then apply the full tool suite to the result. All of this in realtime — incoming events are immediately available for querying — and at interactive speeds. Under the hood, we’re using ideas borrowed from projects like Google’s Dremel and Dapper, and developing new techniques for data management and indexing that adapts to your usage.
Scalyr isn’t just about power and flexibility; it’s also about ease of use. As a service, there’s no backend to install or manage. As a unified system, there’s less to set up and less to learn. As a web site, we’re constantly iterating on our user interface and feature set in response to users.
Scalyr Graphs is a subset of Scalyr, focused on timeseries graphing, dashboards, and alerts. It can import data from existing tools like Graphite and OpenTSDB, as well as custom events through our API. Emphasizing speed, scalability, and ease of use, Scalyr Graphs is designed to be a quick and easy solution if you’re outgrowing your existing graphing system, are tired of throwing hardware at the problem, tired of waiting for dashboards to load, or don’t want the hassle of running your own graph servers.
Click the links above to learn more. We look forward to changing your view of what server monitoring can be!
