IT Pro Start-Up Tour: Librato

Q: What do you keep in your kitchen?

A: Almost certainly not what you'll find in Librato's.

Yes there's a kettle, a toaster and a fridge - but there's also a server rack crammed with the technology that makes this tiny start-up click.

Located in a tiny San Francisco office, that kitchen-based server helps to bring colour and meaning to cloud computing management via a piece of software called Silverline.

With a mere 10 employees, the team is pretty small too. They're all real San Franciscans, as shown by beaming smiles, creative facial hair and eyes firmly attached to screens.

That's not to say these guys are in-your-face types. Head honcho Fred van den Bosch (left of the three above) is positively reserved.

Nevertheless, Librato forms part of an exciting emerging cloud community in San Francisco.

Why should you care?

Put simply, Librato helps companies learn from the past so they can avoid future hitches.

It does so by presenting server use in granular graphic form, letting administrators add triggers and policies.

Say a certain application is sucking up your infrastructure's performance like some out of control Hoover; Silverline helps you learn when and why it was doing so.

Then you can add triggers, so in the future that particular app won't be able to use up so much server power. It's akin to putting a troublesome mutt on a leash.

This means you can guarantee other applications won't flatline due to one workload hogging all the power.