User:Stackerdes/sandbox

Stackdriver is a cloud computing systems management firm based in Boston, MA. They aim to help DevOps manage large, distributed applications running in the public cloud. It visualizes application, system and infrastructure metrics and also provides an policy system to alert users when pre-defined thresholds are breached. Following a $5 million investment by Bain Capital Ventures in 2012, they entered public beta on April 30, 2013.

Company History
Although co-founders Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri first met while working for VMware it wasn't until later, while Azeri was an executive-in-residence at Bain Capital Ventures and Belcher a product manager at Sonian, that their research into cloud monitoring began. They found, through surveying the 100 largest companies using AWS and Rackspace (including Zynga, Netflix and Hubspot) that there were many "pain points" when running large, distributed applications on public cloud infrastructure. Many respondents were monitoring their cloud setup with a range of open-source tools, each covering a different layer. It then became their goal to combine these different levels of monitoring into one single SaaS solution.

After drawing up a business plan around this idea, they secured $5 million funding from Bain in mid-2012 and built an experienced team (including engineers from Red Hat, Acquia and EMC, as well as StyleFeeder founder Phil Jacob). After opening an office at Downtown Crossing, development of Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring began in Fall 2012 and within months the staff had grown to 15. A beta version of the product became publicly available on April 30, 2013. Advisors to Stackdriver include George Kassabgi (Co-Founder, Keas.com, serial entrepreneur), Tom Roloff (Senior Vice President, EMC), Dale Christian (CIO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and Shmuel Kliger (Founder & CTO, VMTurbo).

Features
The aim of Stackdriver Intelligent Monitoring is to improve the performance and availability of large, complex applications running in the public cloud. To that end, it provides metrics detailing every layer of the 'stack' in the form of charts and graphs, while also allowing users to receive alerts when these metrics breach normal levels.

Its features include, but are not limited to:
 * Supporting application, system and infrastructure level metrics ('Full Stack Monitoring')
 * Interactive colored graphs and charts of data (see UI screenshot on right)
 * Create and customize groups and dashboards
 * Input custom metrics
 * Receive alerts when there are anomalies

Stackdriver's long-term goal is to automate common tasks, with the goal of saving customers' time.