Over the past few months, we’ve been steadily upgrading Instrumental’s alert management features! We’ve improved the overall user interface to make working with alerts faster and easier and added new features.

We recently launched our CloudWatch integration, which brings your CloudWatch data into the same monitoring environment as your application metrics, service metrics, and uptime monitoring. Most of our infrastructure is in AWS, so this is a great feature for us; hopefully you’ll like it too!

While Instrumental offers broad support and integrations for application, server, service, and custom monitoring, certain AWS data is only available within the AWS CloudWatch service. Over the past few months, we’ve been testing a deep integration with CloudWatch and are excited to release it to all users. Like the rest of Instrumental, our CloudWatch integration is designed to be simple, configurable, and lightning-fast.

We’ve updated Instrumental’s pricing to be fully metered and we replaced our 30-day trial with an entirely free Development Plan. While Instrumental’s pricing has been usage-based for a long time, this new model eliminates our plans and minimum spend requirements. With no minimum monthly spend, Instrumental is now a much better fit for smaller projects.

Instrumental receives a lot of raw data, upwards of 1,000,000 metrics per second. Because of this, we’ve always used an event queue to aggregate the data before we permanently store it. Before switching to AWS Kinesis, this aggregation was based on many processes writing to AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS) with a one-at-a-time reader that would aggregate data, then push it into another SQS queue, where multiple readers would store the data in MongoDB.

We’re excited to announce two improvements to Instrumental that’ll make it easier to understand the context of your application and server monitoring graphs.

Instrumental is a key piece of infrastructure for many businesses, including Instrumental! We put significant effort into making sure that Instrumental customers can rely on us to be accurate, available, and consistent, but no system is perfect.

Confused about the price of an application and server monitoring tool? So were we! Every tool is priced differently and there are a lot of nuances. We’ll walk you through important terminology differences, the pros and cons of different plans, and then discuss the pricing details for Librato, New Relic, SignalFX, Datadog, and of course, Instrumental.