Librato CloudWatch

- [Instructor] So let's talk about Librato. Librato provides the basics of monitoring systems and many people like to leverage Librato because they leverage it for their traditional environments. They've had Librato around for a long period of time, it exists on premise, they may own a license, and it's the path of least resistance. It's a good alternative to other tools and is complementary as well. Librato is not a bad tool and I think that if you have Librato skills around and you have current administrators who leverage the tool it's going to be the path of least resistance as I mentioned earlier and it's going to be much more cost effective and it's going to work and play well with the other monitoring tools that you may have including CloudWatch AWS, you may even have Datadog to do data analytics, you may have New Relic, you may have Cloud Cruiser, and this thing can certainly fit in that particular mix without providing conflicts.

So what does Librato do? Data collection, that's what it does so Librato is all about the data and you need to understand that when you buy the tool. It does data processing, in other words very much like database operations as to what the data is doing and how it can be trended and reflected and what can be understood by it. Visual insights, the ability to you know kind of look at a dashboard graph in terms of what's going on and how things are trending in terms of CPU utilization, storage utilization, you know all the key metrics that we're going to monitor with these particular tools.

It's able to alert you on critical issues such as something going down. Perhaps a storage system that's reaching capacity such as a CPU that's reaching capacity in a virtual server instance that you're running within a particular public cloud provider, any number of things can be monitored and alerted. And very much like Datadog it has an API for customization. So in other words, we may not find the metrics that we're looking for in a particular tool but Librato provides us with an API which allows us to customize and program Librato to leverage the particular application a certain way so we're monitoring it exactly the way we need.

When you look at this, Librato kind of fits more into the health and performance area. They do do data very much like Datadog but they deal with performance management and health management more than not so they focus on gathering data which they all do by the way. All of these tools gather information and deal with the information in some way, shape, or form but Librato is going to be more towards the health of the various systems. Typically it's going to be chosen by traditional enterprises that may have Librato around already and they may be leveraging it for their internal data center stuff and they want to leverage it for the cloud.

And if that's important to you, it's not a bad alternative.