Review: 3 Web stack monitors in the cloud [Video]

Monitoring services from Boundary, Circonus, and Librato combine simple setup and richly different capabilities

Credit: Gorodenkoff | shutterstock.com

It’s 11 p.m. — do you know what your Web stack is doing? Or not doing? If you’re working for any serious firm, you have to know what’s going wrong because the website is the front door, your mall presence, your receptionist, and your permanent booth in the big trade show called the Internet, all rolled into one. Even if the business is officially closed, insomniacs and people on the other side of the globe are going to come knocking.

The job of monitoring this public face is undergoing a transformation that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. At the beginning, programmers started writing their own scripts that would ping a few pages, then send a text message if something wasn’t right. After that, companies started selling monitoring tools you would install in …