The Year At Scout: 2011 Edition
I’ll remember 2011 as the year of fine-tuning at Scout. From your experience with the end product to our experience delivering it, we invested a lot of our time sanding Scout.
Feature Highlights
- Dashboards – Combine plugin displays and charts across servers for a complete view of your infrastructure’s health.
- Easier Plugin Development – Since we started Scout in 2008, we’ve believed a big reason services go unmonitored is that writing and testing monitoring scripts is painful. We’ll continue working to make plugin development easier.
- Scout API – With the
scout_api
Ruby gem, you can slice and dice your metrics as you see fit. - Fullscreen Charts – Because you look smarter with pretty lines moving on a wall-mounted plasma display.
- Spotlight-like Server Navigation – You’re monitoring more servers with Scout, so we made it easier to navigate between them.
A Banner Year for Plugins: 200+ commits from 20 authors
With nearly 60 monitoring plugins in our directory, Scout’s breadth of coverage grew substantially in 2011. Some of the highlights:
- CouchDB – Authored by John Wood
- HAProxy
- JMX Monitoring – Authored by David Dossot
But it’s not just new plugins that I was excited about: Scout plugins grew incredibly more robust. Our plugin repository on Github had more than 200 commits from 20 authors in 2011. Thanks for all of your pull requests and bug reports: there are few things I love more than solidifying Scout’s core.
Blog Post Highlights
We think it’s important for you to know how our brains function at Scout. Some of the highlights (or lowlights, depending on your interpretation):
- The Only Two Business Metrics That Matter
- Don’t build to get acquired. Build to say “No”
- Tina Fey: go with the bran muffin on the white plate
Implementing our succession plan
We plan on Scout being around for a long time. 2011 saw the start of our grand succession plan: both Andre and I brought home baby girls this year. While my two-month old daughter is lacking focus at this point, I’m confident she’ll be ready to take over my share of Scout by 2035.
2012
I’ve never been more excited about Scout. We eliminated a lot of cruft from Scout in 2011 that’s freeing us up to make monitoring even easier in 2012. Thanks for your continued feedback, bug reports, and plugin commits: you’re making Scout better every year.