“There are plenty of frustrated system administrators, developers, engineers, “devops” and everything under the sun who don’t want much. All they really want is for shit to work. When shit breaks, they want to be notified. They want pretty graphs. They want to see business metrics alongside operational ones. They want to have a 52-inch monitor in the office that everyone can look at and say: ‘See that red dot? That’s bad. Here’s what was going on when we got that red dot. Let’s fix that shit and go get beers.’”

The above is an excerpt from a June 2011 blog post by John E. Vincent, director of cloud infrastructure at EnStratus and one of the leaders of the #monitoringsucks movement.

The below is the motto for YCombinator, a startup accelerator that provides seed money, advice, and connections to startups.

“Make something people want.”

You put both together and you get AppFirst.

Welcome to a world where monitoring doesn’t suck.

We’ve worked with our customers to build out a product that they want, and come August, they’ll have it. Coincidentally, all the things that Vincent mentions are things that we address.

1. When stuff breaks, they want to be notified. Check.
2. They want pretty graphs. Check.
3. They want to see business metrics alongside operational ones. Check.
4. They want to have a 52-inch monitor in the office that everyone can look at. Check.
5. Let’s fix that shit and go get beers. Check. We’re sorry to say that AppFirst cannot provide you beers once you fix things

All you frustrated sys admins, developers, engineers, devops, and everyone else out there, AppFirst is here to make your life easier (and fix shit faster so you can go get beers).

John Vincent, here’s your Step Three.

Business Metrics on top, Operational Metrics on bottom

Our dashboard, live at the Yipit.com office.

DevOps Dashboard at Yipit for the whole company to see

Want to see more? Check out our demo video.