CopperEgg is an interesting SaaS-based cloud monitoring company that offers its customers an easy way to perform server monitoring, Website monitoring and cloud analytics to make their jobs easier.  This startup is constantly looking for new ways to provide its customers with a better way to gain added visibility into their environments.  And today, they announced another such capability -- RevealUptime.  This is a free Website monitoring and Web performance analytics solution.  So to find out more, I went to the top and spoke with Bob Quillin, the company's CEO.  Here is our conversation.

Bob Quillin:  Today, CopperEgg has announced and released RevealUptime, a new, free website monitoring and web performance analytics solution developed for operations teams –webops, devops, IT ops – that provides advanced features typically only available in more expensive or complex tools.  Not only does RevealUptime monitor website uptime from a worldwide perspective, but it also monitors detailed web application response time, TCP services, return codes, and web health metrics that give you much more actionable data for fixing a website or web application issue – to determine root cause of a problem helping to isolate issues down to server, network, or application errors.

VMblog:  What makes RevealUptime different from other Web monitoring solutions out there?

Quillin:  I’d say simply that RevealUptime is free, fast, and smart.  It maximizes real-time visibility with 15-second measurement frequencies and minimizes false alarms with composite analytics.  To maximize visibility into web performance, CopperEgg monitoring stations are located around the globe, and monitor at 15-seconds per station – a configurable setting you determine based on the criticality of the site and its function – ensuring that a station will be measuring application response time, uptime, and website health every two to three seconds.  The stations are located in the United States, Japan, and Europe.   Probes can be configured to monitor from one particular station, just U.S. stations, just International stations, or from all stations. Composite analytics track performance averaged across multiple stations to ensure no single anomalous station measurement triggers a false alarm.

VMblog:  Ok, so in a nutshell, explain to us what CopperEgg does and who uses it.

Quillin:  CopperEgg is a cloud monitoring company that provides server, website, and web application monitoring as a service.  Our customers are typically cloud-hosted in Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Linode, or in other public or private cloud environments.  CopperEgg customers rave that we’re really simple to try, use, and scale.  We offer a range of free and pay-per-use options so there’s lots of flexibility – from startups to larger enterprises.  Real-time measurements allow you to quickly drilldown to pinpoint web infrastructure issues and then take action to fix the problem.  Proactive alarms, integrations into tools like Chef and HipChat, webhooks, annotations, and multi-user access enable a fully-featured monitoring solution delivered as a truly easy-to-use service.

VMblog:  So then multiple users can access RevealUptime?

Quillin:  Yes, multi-user website monitoring in RevealUptime ensures different users can have role-based views that are filtered or partitioned based on their responsibilities or interests.  MSPs, web hosters, and PaaS providers can provide filtered views for their customers, too.  Both read-only and administrative options can be configured.  Multi-user access across the team ensures collaboration within the team or between a provider and their customers.  It also creates a common reference point for determining root cause issues, eliminating finger pointing and facilitating SLA discussions.

VMblog:  And how does RevealUptime Website monitoring integrate with RevealCloud server monitoring?

Quillin:  Users can cross-correlate RevealCloud server metrics with RevealUptime web application response time metrics to analyze inside-out performance with outside-in performance.  With both elements in hand you can detect an issue and take action to fix it.  If time-to-first byte indicates a server issue or data transfer times indicate application problems, you can use system and process metrics to determine where in the application infrastructure your problem is located.  Not only is CopperEgg providing a smoke alarm to tell you your performance is slow, but we are also bringing the fire hose to help put the fire out.

VMblog:  Do you also provide predictive Web performance metrics?

Quillin:  The health metrics that CopperEgg calculates for server health and website health are based on a composite measurement across various key performance characteristics.  We aggregate individual metrics into a single health measurement and accounts for dynamic baselines and predictive trends to adjust overall health up or down appropriately.

VMblog:  You guys have a lot of great things going on.  What’s next for CopperEgg?

Quillin:  Our beta customers love the integration between RevealCloud and RevealUptime to see performance from the inside and the outside.  It helps them eliminate multiple point tools they currently own and dislike and to consolidate on a single, unified an actionable view that can be shared across different users and teams.  We plan to expand the integration and analytics to increase the value of the cloud intelligence we are collecting today.  Our customers are encouraging us to expand in a broad set of dimensions from cloud capacity planning to web application management to cloud automation, so stay tuned!

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Thanks again to Bob Quillin, CEO of CopperEgg, for taking time out to speak with me and answer a few questions.