Companies that adopt Chef across their full stack, from “bare metal” through application deployment, sometimes feel pretty darn powerful. Chef is fantastic at taking your desired infrastructure outcomes and making them happen– scale with little effort, build and rebuild infrastructure, create dev/test/prod environments etc.
But how do you decide what those desired outcomes are? How do you make informed decisions around how much to scale, when to re-tune mysql, where your app bottlenecks are, etc.? How do you know “What is and what should be?”
Enter Appfirst and the DevOps Dashboard. Appfirst’s monitoring service brings full-stack visibility into systems, applications and business metrics. It collects everything from the most granular running processes, to high level business metrics, and combines it all in one single view.
At Opscode, we are very excited to be collaborating with the team at Appfirst to make it as easy as possible for Chef users to add full-stack visibility to Chef-managed infrastructure. The very first step is an Appfirst cookbook initially built by Yipit (a joint customer) and released today on cookbooks.opscode.com. Getting started is as simple as can be: (i) download the cookbook, (ii) add your account info, (iii) add the appfirst recipe to your base role’s runlist, and you are good to go.
We will also be demonstrating the cookbook at the AWS re:Invent show in Vegas. Please stop by to see it in action!