CIRCONUS the Blog Performance Monitoring - Revolutionized.

One of the big announcements for us at Velocity 2010 last week was the formal release of our Developer site and Management API. Designed as a RESTful service, the Circonus API was designed to allow users to programmatically adjust monitors and alerts as their architecture evolves. Currently it supports all basic functionality for managing Checks, Metrics, Contacts and Contact Groups, Rules and Metric Dependencies. Support for managing Graphs and Worksheets will be released in a future version.

But publishing a Web Services API is only the first part of the puzzle. You really have to cultivate the community using it, by demonstrating just how easy and powerful it really is. We're planning to publish tons of useful examples here and over at the Developer site in the days and weeks to come. You might even see examples in the form of Chef recipes or Puppet modules.

Coincidentally, the guys over at Opscode have been doing their part to help out too. Adam Jacob, the CTO of Opscode and creator of Chef, took it upon himself to extend our API and make it even easier for Ruby and Rails users. Check out his ruby-circonus project over at GitHub.

Needless to say, the disciplines of Agile Operations and Infrastructure as Code rely on the sort of programmatic elasticity that our new API makes possible. Deploying systems and services is just one small part of the solution; it's vital to track the performance of your IT systems and be able to correlate their effects on your Business systems. Automating your monitoring system to evolve in step with your architecture is a great way to avoid the human factor which will inevitably result in missing monitors and alerts.

Hot on the heels of our RailsConf ticket giveaway, we have another contest for a free pass to Velocity 2010! I'm really excited to attend this year's Velocity. It's the Web Performance event to attend, and a great place to see the sharpest whips in the industry.

Like before, the rules of this giveaway are simple. Just tweet a message about Circonus being at Velocity and ask your friends to retweet it. The original "twitterer" with the most retweets by Friday, June 14 at noon (12pm EDT) wins. Here's an example:

The @Circonus stuff is hot and it looks like they'll be at #velocityconf this year: http://l42.org/dA

That's an easy way to earn a free 2010 Velocity sessions pass ($1295 value). Free free to get creative with your tweet message. Our only requirements are that it's a positive message that mentions @Circonus and #velocityconf, and that it includes the http://l42.org/dA link.

Yay, free stuff!