Author Archive: Guest Blog

This is a guest blog from Librato about Metrics. Metrics brings all of your monitoring data together in a unified hosted environment, enabling you to detect signs of problems early, minimize their impact through automated actions, and quickly find and fix their root cause.

Measure Everything!

If you’re a SaaS or PaaS provider, making sure that you deliver the Quality of Service that your users expect is probably your highest priority. This means that you rely on continuously monitoring all aspects of your operation that can alert you to unusual events and help you find and fix the root cause of any service degradations. User complaints cannot be the first sign of trouble, and there is no time to hunt for data that has not already been collected.

This need for information is the main reason why “Measure Everything” is the new principle by which SaaS and PaaS clouds are managed and why many DevOps and Operations teams are using a variety of open source and commercial tools to monitor their infrastructure. In addition they often need to monitor data that is collected with custom tools because it is specific to their application environment. Since each tool comes with its own user interface, alerting mechanism and set-up requirements, the monitoring work-flow is disjointed, wastes time, and – most importantly – introduces problems when trying to correlate data from different tools for rapid root cause analysis.

Wouldn’t it be nice if – just as there are standard Database Management platforms – there were Time Series Data Management platforms that provide uniform visualization, correlation and alerting, and a scalable, redundant repository for your metrics? Ideally, that platform would be delivered as a service and could even be embedded by SaaS and PaaS vendors to allow users to monitor their services directly.

Librato Metrics is the platform we built to meet that critical need. Designed from the ground up with an “API first” approach, Metrics allows customers and partners to easily send it any time series data and understand how that data fits with other data they are collecting.

If you want to provide your users with monitoring capabilities, you can integrate and embed Metrics at whatever level best fits your needs: data repository, instruments for your own dashboards, or complete “white label” dashboards. By programmatically creating user accounts and transparently signing your users onto the Metrics platform, you can deliver a seamless experience.

We used “flexible,” “affordable” and “simple” as our key mottos in developing a business model for Metrics. Our goal was to make the platform easy to adopt and completely transparent, empowering every organization to take advantage of the “measure everything” philosophy. We charge a modest amount (in “micro-dollars” actually) per measurement, provide a 30-day free trial, and charge you monthly for what you have used … there are no minimum fees or lock-ins.

To make it easy to adopt Metrics, we provide connectors for a variety of popular collection agents such as StatsD, CollectD, and JMX. To help build a broad collection of useful collectors and connectors to existing tools, we’re building a community and ecosystem where Metrics users and tool developers can contribute. We hope you’ll try out the platform and help us grow our community!

-Fred van den Bosch, Librato

This is a guest blog from Spot Influence. Spot Influence provides businesses with detailed information on who’s influential in the world of social media and what those influencers actually care about. This data, accessed via an API, enables companies to react faster with more information and, more importantly, to be proactive and execute a strategic social media plan.

Discover the People Who Drive Your Business

If you’re involved in marketing, you understand the importance of monitoring your business’s community online. You also probably know that engaging with the “Influencers” who speak to your intended audience can be critical to understanding their needs and spreading your brand’s message. But existing tools are limited in their ability to find these individuals. They don’t allow you to sift through the noise and discover the people who are already impacting your business online.

Spot Influence is a data service that provides granular, actionable information to businesses about their online audience and the people who are influencing them. With this data, business can discover the key influencers they need to be paying attention to and gain valuable insight regarding their existing customers: their online profiles, where they publish and engage with content, and what they care about.

Solving this problem at scale is incredibly challenging. We deal with vast amounts of unstructured data, processing tens of millions of URLs and creating terabytes of data every day. That’s why we’re excited to be a SoftLayer customer and a part of the Technology Partners Marketplace. SoftLayer enables us to cost-effectively scale our machines to meet customer needs.

If you’re interested in learning more about Spot Influence, please check out the following links and sign up for the Beta on our website!

Website: http://spotinfluence.com/
Blog: http://blog.spotinfluence.com/
Twitter: @spotinfluence

-Dave Angulo and Rich Grote, Co-Founders, Spot Influence

Tech Wildcatters is a mentor-driven technology startup accelerator led by entrepreneurs in the Dallas area. The 12-week “boot camp” runs every spring and fall, providing experience and exposure to the 8-10 companies selected to participate in each class. Dennis Dayman, a Tech Wildcatters partner and mentor, explains what Tech Wildcatters is all about and why they chose to partner with SoftLayer:

In the coming weeks, you’ll meet a few of the startups that have benefited from the Tech Wildcatters program, and we’ll share some of their post-accelerator success with you.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can participate in the Tech Wildcatters startup accelerator, visit http://techwildcatters.com. If you already know you want to take advantage of the opportunities Tech Wildcatters can provide, their simple online application is the only thing between you and your soon-to-be-huge business!

This is a guest blog from Mike Rabb, VP of business development for CopperEgg, a featured member of the SoftLayer Technology Partners Marketplace. CopperEgg provides real-time insight into the speed and availability of applications and services on cloud, virtual and physical server.

Knowing Your Apps Are Up and Running = Peace of Mind

Whether you are building or managing apps in the cloud, it’s important they stay up and running optimally. With cloud performance monitoring by CopperEgg you can do just that! RevealCloud Pro takes less than 10 seconds to install and provides performance monitoring so you can rest assured and know your apps are up and running smoothly.

With RevealCloud Pro you gain real-time insight into the speed and availability of services by monitoring CPU, network load, uptime, blocked processes, memory space, disk space and more. At the first sign of trouble, RevealCloud Pro can immediately alert you email, SMS or Pagerduty when performance in one or more areas is outside of normal ranges. You can even take action via a webhook. This enables you to uncover and correct performance issues often before the system goes down. In addition, historical tracking over the last 30 days enables you to uncover trends in performance and capacity that could otherwise go unnoticed.

With a rapidly growing customer base spanning over 50 countries, we know we are on to something good! Read what they have to say…

Customer Speak
Eduardo Fernandez, president of Shuttle Cloud, is a current Softlayer customer, and he shared a little about his experience with RevealCloud Pro:

“Our business is built in the cloud so monitoring performance is critical. With RevealCloud Pro, we have an easy to install and easy to use product that gives us everything we need to monitor our instances and ensure our systems are running optimally. I like the high level view RevealCloud provides of all instances on one screen so I can see the health of our systems at-a glance. By contrast, members of my team need to know in real-time if any of our instances are either not responsive or have a very high load, memory or processing issue. By receiving alerts as soon as an issue occurs via cell or email means we can address things immediately. We also use the historical tracking to monitor trends and look at activity during the overnight hours.”

In addition to cloud performance monitoring, RevealCloud Pro also works on servers located on premise, in the data center, or in virtual environments. RevealCloud Pro makes viewing multiple systems simple, and is ideal for those who want to compare performance among their servers with no hassle.

Offer for SoftLayer Customers
Experience RevealCloud for yourself … It’s addictive! Try RevealCloud Pro for free today.

- Mike Raab, CopperEgg

This is a guest blog from the PeopleBrowsr team about Kred. Kred is the first social scoring system to provide people with a comprehensive, contextual score for their Influence and Outreach within interest-based communities.

We All Have Influence Somewhere

The social networking revolution provides the unprecedented opportunity to observe, filter and analyze conversations in real time. For marketers and anyone interested in human behavior, it’s now possible to examine the collective consciousness for insights into consumer behavior and detection and engagement with the most influential people.

Increasingly, we find that the elements that determine “influence” in online networks are the same as they are in “real life” relationships: Trust and Generosity within small close networks of friends and subject matter experts. These in turn have become the foundations for Kred, a brand new way to understand anyone’s Influence and Outreach across social media and within Communities formed around interests and affinities.

‘We All Have Influence Somewhere,’ so Kred sifts through billions of social posts from over 110 million people in real time to uncover who is most influential on any subject, keyword or hashtag. This all summarized in Kredentials, which displays anyone’s history on Twitter over the last three years with a single click, including their top communities, most used words, most clicked links and much more.

Here are just a few of the other ways Kred is an evolution of influence measurement:

Dual Scores for Influence and Outreach
Influence – scored on a 1-1000 scale – shows the likelihood that your posts provoke actions from others. Outreach demonstrates your generosity in ReTweeting and replying to others.

Community
Real influence comes from expertise and passion. Kred is calculated for everyone in Communities that naturally form around interests and affinities.

Complete Transparency
Visitors to Kred.ly can see how all of their social actions count towards their scores – and how their connections’ actions affect them as well. Those who want a more thorough accounting of their score can take advantage of our Score Audit feature.

Offline Kred
Kred is the only influence measure to integrate offline achievements with online identity. Visitors can add their accomplishments – anything from academic honors to club memberships – by sending us a PDF from the ‘Get More Kred‘ menu tab inside the Kred site. We will then hand score it and manually add points.

Kred is free for everyone at http://kred.ly and deeply integrated into Playground, PeopleBrowsr’s social analytics platform. For those who wish to build custom applications off of our datamine of 1,000 days of social data, Kred can be accessed via our Playground API, Kredentials API and through a standalone API.

Many key unique features of Kred – including score audits, privacy controls and real-time activity statements – are based on feedback from our community of friends and colleagues. What would you like to see in its next evolution?

Give Kred a try and let us know what you think via email: kred@peoplebrowsr.com or on Twitter: @kred.

- Shawn Roberts, PeopleBrowsr

We invite each of our featured SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partners to contribute a guest post to the SoftLayer Blog, and this week, we’re happy to welcome Eli Feldblum, CTO and Founder of RankAbove. RankAbove is a leader in search engine optimization (SEO) technologies and data management that helps solve complex SEO challenges for enterprise-sized organizations’ websites via a combination of proprietary technology, innovation and creativity.

The New Number One Spot: Planning for the Future of SEO

You run a successful business, or at least the IT for a successful business — that’s why you’re on SoftLayer. And, chances are, you’ve already spent lots of time and effort optimizing your site for search engines. You’ve built backlinks; you’ve ensured the structure of your site allows the search engine spiders to see every page of the site and prevents the creation of duplicate content; you’ve carefully written titles, friendly URLs and header tags; and you’ve continuously tweaked your on-page content to get to the number one spot in Google, Bing and other search engines.

Unfortunately, that apical spot is quickly becoming an apocryphal one; being number one isn’t what is used to be. The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) has undergone dramatic changes in the past few years, and even if you optimize perfectly and grab the top spot, you might be pushed down (even below the fold) by a variety of other Google products:

• Ads & Comparison Ads
• Local Results
• Image Results
• Video Results
• Shopping Results

In today’s SEO market, you need to optimize not only for regular web results, but for every other Google product too. Luckily, there are a few tips you can use to make sure you appear in those products, and get the new and improved global number one spot—and lots of traffic too.

Read RankAbove’s Tips for Local, Images and Video! »

This is a guest blog from ServerOrigin’s Kevin Hatfield about ethProxy. ethProxy is perfect for any company that wishes to secure its web presence against DDoS attacks and intrusion-based hacking attempts. Its filtering was built to provide enterprise-grade technology and uptime while still remaining below the cost of the competition.

DDoS Protection: Do you need it?

In the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen a references to denial-of-service attacks in the news and how the fallout from those attacks can leave businesses ‘picking up pieces’ for weeks or months after they occur. Think about the helplessness you’d feel if the business you poured your heart and soul into is shut down by some malicious person or group’s attack on your web presence. Worse yet, those attacks are usually for that person’s or group’s own monetary gain or to satisfy some ego-driven urge to punish you for being successful in either your business or a cause you believe in.

It happens all too often, and most people don’t realize that it can actually happen to them. On a weekly basis, I speak to at least one person that tells me, “We’re small, and we really don’t have any competitors … Our website is down. If we can’t stop this attack, I am going to have to send all of my employees home and close down!”

The truth is that denial-of-service protection providers normally sell “fear.” They do this because people don’t have answers to a few key questions about DDoS protection:

Read the rest of ServerOrigin’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from the MODX team. MODX offers an intuitive, feature-rich, open source content management platform that can easily integrate with other applications as the heart of your Customer Experience Management solution.

Free your Website with MODX CMS

Just having a website or a blog is no longer a viable online strategy for smart businesses. Today’s interconnected world requires engaging customers — from the first impression, to developing leads, educating, selling, empowering customer service and beyond. This key shift in online interaction is known as Customer Experience Management, or CXM.

For businesses to have success with CXM, they need an efficient way to connect all facets of their communications and information together with a modern and consistent look and feel, and without long learning curves or frustrating user experiences. You don’t want a Content Management System (CMS) that restricts your ability to meet brand standards, that lives in isolation from your other systems and data, or that fails to fulfil your businesses needs.

MODX is a content management platform that gives you the creative freedom to build custom websites limited only by your imagination. It certainly can play the central role in managing your customer experience.

Read the rest of MODX’s Guest Blog! »

This is a guest blog from Native Rank. Native Rank provides an effective solution for improving your visibility across search engines, social networks and web maps. They are a full-service search and advertising solution for small to large businesses both on a local and national level.

Ranking Well != Being Well Ranked

There is a common misconception in Search Engine Optimization: That if Company A was just on the first page for some random keyword, the sky would open up and leads would fall from the heavens. This is not always the case, and a better place to start the process of deciding what Key Words will be most effective for a client to rank for can be assessed in 3 easy steps:

1. In depth keyword analysis for terms that your customers actually use to find a business like yours. If you specialize in DUI law, keywords structured around your area of expertise will lead to a higher quality of lead than the search term, “Denver Attorney.”
2. Be realistic about who your competitors are and find where they are ranking organically. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. This will give you a good road map for what your competitors are doing and they are creating success.
3. If you have a physical location make sure your local maps listings for Google, Yahoo and Bing are optimized and Owner Verified. The Search Engines want to show your business to Searchers that are in your Geographic area..Please let them!

Once you have gone through those three easy steps, make sure that the SEO company you are working with has the same expectations that you have for your business. Targeted success metrics and milestones need to be at the core of your SEO strategy. Ranking for 50 Keywords that bounce at 90% will not result in more customers through your door. It is very important that the SEO firm you use has your business objectives in mind. If not you may find yourselves three or six months down the road having a very uncomfortable conversation about what success is.

If you’ve never made a concerted effort into SEO and SEM strategy, we’d be happy to share some of the tools we’ve developed to get you ranking well whether you consider yourself a local business or a national one. Head over to http://nativerank.com/ to see a few of our products in action and learn a little more about our service.

-Winston Cook, Native Rank

This is a guest blog from ICC Global Hosting’s Mark Moeller. ICC’s Hosted Virtual Desktop delivers full-featured Windows desktop computing environments, including Microsoft Office, anti-virus, and data storage to any device, anywhere, anytime.

Accessing Desktop Apps Anytime, Anywhere, from Any Device

The computing world is changing rapidly – driven by the consumerization of applications, the demands for employees to be in an “always on” mode, and the revolution of mobile computing. End users have become App savvy and with the advent of the “there’s an app for that” generation applications that have become very easy for end users to install and run on their own. The computing platforms they use have become self-service in nature and new applications are now easy to find and no longer require IT to research, purchase, install, and manage. In fact, IT departments have lost control over what applications run on these devices posing a huge support problem and security threat.

In today’s economy organizations demand their employees to do more with smaller staffs forcing employees to be “always on” with e-mail and other work data now delivered to their desktops, smart phones, tablets, and home computers. People on average now access work data and applications from three devices with new choices of mobile devices available almost daily.

VDI Sticker Shock – With all of these changes many IT departments have considered virtual desktops as a solution to provide access to multiple platforms, remote access, and secured network stored data. Consultants and vendors have been trying to sell organizations virtual desktops as VDI, but most organizations suffer from sticker shock facing huge start-up costs and little or no economies of scale. Most organizations fail to see any potential ROI with VDI solutions and end up tabling the decision for next year’s budget.

Read the rest of ICC’s Guest Blog! »