As a hobbyist programmer and full-time operations geek, I’ve been involved in my share of odd software projects. More often than not I’ve had to explain the purpose of the thing, answering numerous questions about the why, what or whowuzzit. I can say without any reservation that Circonus is that rare venture that breaks through the trappings of application design and me-too engineering principles to become something truly revolutionary. To use the product is to highlight Circonus’ strengths. User reactions tell the story.

Bryan Allen, chief server wrangler over at Pobox, has been one of our earliest and most active Beta participants. These folks have been doing email services for longer than I’ve been using it. In a field this competitive, there is zero room for slack, and they know it. Bryan is a very sharp guy, so we were very pleased to read his thoughts on Circonus.

Monitoring, trending and fault analysis are tedious. So much so, most shops get them wrong, or don’t bother at all. Circonus is already poised to be a disruptive player; making the tedious easy, fast and accurate.

I was grateful to meet Bryan in person during my visit to Philly for PostgreSQL Conference, U.S. 2010. I’ve learned that Pobox and OmniTI share a number of common technical interests and philosophies, so it should come as no large surprise that they’d see some value in our efforts.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the team at 37signals. They are an established leader in web design and SaaS solutions. Their specific forte is with simple (yet powerful) productivity services like Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and Highrise. Heck, they created Ruby on Rails. If anyone knows good web applications, you better believe they do. We were fortunate to have Mark Imbriaco, Operations Manager for 37signals, run Circonus through the paces during our Beta program.

Circonus’ trending functions are incredibly powerful. The ability to consolidate metrics across a variety of services into a single graph makes it much easier to spot bottlenecks in one area that may correlate to performance problems in another. It’s a graph nerd’s paradise!

I’ll have to take Mark’s word on the last part. Many geeks’ idea of paradise lies somewhere on a beach with a frosty beverage and a strong wireless signal. But if you’re like Mark, and you need something to monitor your systems, you probably owe it to yourself to add Circonus to your shopping list.

There’s one word that I’ve heard repeated a few times from users, that Circonus is disruptive. Occasionally you’ll hear the word banted about to describe a new social media outlet or computing device. It’s usually associated with a revolutionary technology. There’s nothing new about monitoring, trending or fault detection. But there is something refreshingly insightful about the synergy of monitoring services on a single unified metric collection.

Enjoy the Revolution.

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