ylastic blog

Are you a texting ninja that gets their info fixes via short messages? Ylastic can send you AWS alerts via SMS. If you want to receive an SMS on an international number, just append a +CountryCode to the phone number on the settings page :-)

Tired of looking at all that time period based data as tables? So are we. Want something more visual, and easier to grok and navigate?

Introducing time line based visualization for EC2 auto scaling activities, your AWS monitoring alerts and audit history of all the changes made to your AWS environment.

• A calendar like view that displays these events along with super simple navigation. 
• Simply drag either of the panes to scroll across time periods. 
• You can also click on any blue markers displayed in the bottom pane to navigate to that specific time.
• Each event is displayed with a distinctive icon and a brief subject. 
• Click any event to get more detail. 
• And you can even toggle between this new timeline view and the usual tabular view with a simple click!

Ylastic - Making cloud management a pleasure, one resource at a time :-)

Ylastic now has additional monitors for keeping an eye on those EC2 instances.

• HTTP
• HTTPS
• HTTPS Strict Check - the SSL certificate CN and the hostname must match
• SSH
• Ping
• DNS resolution for the instance public address
• Reverse DNS resolution for the instance elastic IP address

You can get the alerts for these monitors any way you want. Here is a sample email alert.

Here is an alert via twitter as viewed in Twhirl.

• EC2 Instances
• RDS Databases
• EBS Volumes
• AWS Service Health
• Usage Costs
• Scaling activities
• Load Balancers

Want to do more than just get alerts via email, twitter, jabber, SMS or voice when things happen to your AWS resources and thresholds set by you are breached? Would you like to run some custom scripting, hook up other apps or update your internal dashboard ? Introducing Web hooks for super simple integration and extension of Ylastic alerting. Give us an URL - http or https, and we will post to it when alerts are triggered.

• Trying to get a handle on your spending for AWS? 
• Want to slice and dice the costs by service to see the distribution of your spending?
• Need a bird's eye view of your daily costs for a service?
• Want to monitor your costs?
• Get alerts when cost thresholds set by you are crossed?
• You say you also want to view last month's spending?
• The damage for the whole year?
• And you also want to view them on the go from your iPhone, Android or Blackberry?

We have just the right fix for you. Introducing Ylastic's latest feature - AWS Usage costs crunched, sliced, diced and delivered to you just the way you want.

Create monitors for costs either for individual services or for all of them and get alerts when thresholds are breached via email, twitter, jabber, or even a voice alert to your phone. Did you say SMS? Ylastic now supports SMS for all alerts. Here's an SMS delivered to Google Voice!

Get a handle on those cloud costs, and simplify your cloud management. Even more cost related tools coming to Ylastic soon!

Ylastic has complete support for the recently released EBS Cloudwatch metrics.

• View and drill into detailed Cloudwatch data for all your EBS volumes. Select time periods of your choice and view all the metrics on one page. All the times are in the timezone of your choice, not UTC.
  
• View EBS cloudwatch charts on your iPhone or Android. Keeps tabs on those pesky volumes while you are on the go.
  
• Set up monitors for any EBS metrics of your choice. You do want to know what's happening, right?
  
• Receive alerts via email, jabber, twitter or voice when those thresholds are triggered.
  

Manage your cloud, the easy way !

Every biz/organization/individual/start-up that is using EC2 has their own different operations workflow that they use. Ylastic alerting is built to fit right into that workflow, by letting you pick the delivery channel that fits your needs best. You use email exclusively, you can get alerts through email. If you are more into IM/chat, get alerted via Jabber/Google Talk. Your ops guys/devs hang out on twitter all the time? We got you covered with alerts as tweets. If you prefer the old-fashioned way, we can even alert you by calling your phone with a voice alert! *You* are in control - pick the delivery channel that you want. Here are some nifty things our users are doing:

• Use it as a rolling weekly ops pager by turning on the phone alert for the current person and turning them off for the other users.
• Want alerting via SMS to your phone? Set up your twitter account with a phone number, get your alerts as tweets, and have Twitter send them to you as SMS messages! (works in the US, Canada and India)

Ylastic now supports management, monitoring and alerting for the recently introduced Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Set up and scale those MySQL based databases in the cloud easily:

• Manage DB instances.
• Manage DB parameter groups for configuring your database.
• Manage DB security authorizations.
• Manage DB snapshots and restoration of new DBs.
• View all DB events logged by RDS.
• View pending changes to your databases.
• Monitor your databases by setting thresholds and getting alerts when they are triggered - email, twitter, jabber and voice.
• Easily view and zoom into your DB cloud watch metrics to look at the data you want.

Ylastic can now send voice alerts to your phone when CloudWatch monitoring thresholds are triggered, Auto Scaling activities are initiated and AWS service health status changes are detected. Check out the screencast and turn up that volume :-)

• CPU Utilization
• Bytes read from all disks for instance
• Bytes written to all disks for instance
• Completed read operations from all disks for instance
• Completed write operations from all disks for instance
• Bytes received on all network interfaces for instance
• Bytes sent out on all network interfaces for instance
• Latency for the load balancer
• Number of requests processed by the load balancer
• Number of unhealthy instances for load balancer

Ylastic makes it super simple to monitor your CloudWatch enabled instances and elastic load balancers, along with autoscaling activities.

• Enable CloudWatch for the instances you want to monitor.
  
  
  
• Select the monitors you want and set their threshold.