- Beautiful Graphs
- Public Repository of Threshold-Based Trigger Scripts
- Changelog now Available
- Fedora 13 Support
- Ruby Gem Released
- Dashboard now HTTPS-only
- Silverline on the Rackspace Tools Network
- 2.x EOL
Welcome to the February 2011 newsletter! It’s spring time in California with weather ranging from 35F to 78F... crazy! You will be happy to hear that we have not been spending all our time on the slopes or at the beach but have been pumping out some fantastic features - here’s a snapshot:
Beautiful Graphs
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but if you ask me, our design Guru Dan has delivered what I would consider true eye candy. When you log in to your Silverline Portal you will find a much cleaner, sleeker UI leveraging more of the screen space and adding intuitive menus and buttons. I hope you like it as much as we do.
One new feature we added to the graphs is auto refresh. Now you can deploy that new code, sit back and watch your app's resource consumption change (or not) in real time!
Public Repository of Threshold-Based Trigger Scripts
Did you know you can leverage your monitoring tags to trigger scripts? We call this threshold-based triggering. Pick one of the eight resources you can set triggers on and create a script that can take any action you desire - from simple tasks such as sending you a notification to complex actions such as spinning up new server instances or killing the processes that use the most memory or CPU.
To make script creation simpler we have created a public repository on Githubto house different trigger scripts. We hope that as more users start leveraging our threshold-based triggers we will be able to collect a rich collection of scripts that can be taken off the shelf and used either as-is or as inspiration for new ones. If you would like to contribute, just fork the repository and send us a pull request. Happy Hacking!
Changelog now Available
One of the main motivators to launch Librato Silverline as SaaS was to be able to deploy changes quickly and frequently. It is a different matter when it comes to the Silverline Agent. The Agent is deployed on your production environment so it has to be fully under your control. Although our support for native package management systems (e.g. APT, Yum) makes upgrading simple, we realize that any change in production infrastructure requires planning, so we've created a public changelog to communicate the features and improvements included in each release of the Silverline Agent. Armed with this information, you can now make informed decisions about when to schedule your Silverline Agent upgrades. For update notifications you cansubscribe to the changelog via RSS or just follow us on Twitter!
Fedora 13 Support
We have added Fedora 13 to the list of supported platforms. We updated our Yum repository with RPM's built and tested on Fedora 13 so that you can use your native package-management tools to install and update Librato Silverline. Detailed instructions on configuring access to the Yum repository can be found in our installation walk-through. We're always working on expanding our set of supported platforms, so if you have another one you'd like to see supported, let us know!
Ruby Gem Released
We have released a Ruby gem for our our REST API hosted at rubygems.org. The source code can be found on Github. The source code includes some basic examples. To install just:
$ gem install librato_silverline_api
Dashboard now HTTPS-only
The entire Librato Silverline site is now HTTPS-only, whereas previously we had just always ensured that sensitive forms such as your login were encrypted. We felt that given both the relatively low overhead of encrypting all traffic and recent advances in session hijacking (e.g. Firesheep), this was the only acceptable course of action for our users.
Silverline on the Rackspace Tools Network
We recently announced our entry into the Rackspace Tools Network. Our CEO, Fred van den Bosch, wrote a blog post on how Librato Silverline is positioned in comparison to CloudKick, the company Rackspace acquired in December last year.
2.x EOL
In our last newsletter we said that as of March 1, 2011 versions 2.x.x will no longer be supported. Well - we hit an unexpected problem with our security certificate which translated to the service becoming unavailable on February 6, 2011. We apologize sincerely for any inconvenience this may have caused 2.x.x users. Please re-check that your software is updated to the latest version. Don't hesitate to contact us if you need help with upgrading to 3.x.
Interested in more topics? Search our knowledge base, read our blog, follow us on twitter, or please tell us if you have ideas, comments or suggestions.
If you like Librato Silverline - please spread the word!
Thank you for your support!
Your Librato Silverline Team
www.librato.com