Cloud Monitoring Startup Finally.io Now Lets Customers Add Rules To Test And Scale Out Their Infrastructure

Last summer, Finally.io launched to help the vast number of companies using cloud services to monitor their performance and make changes when things went awry. Now the company is adding a whole new wrinkle to its service, allowing its clients to set rules that can be used to test the resilience of their cloud infrastructure, automatically scale up or restart when needed.

The service works by enabling customers to enter their credentials and providing them with a single dashboard from which they can monitor cloud service performance. But with the new feature, users can easily create set rules that provide proactive automation in case that service breaks down.

“We envision this to be a bigger deal than monitoring,” co-founder Luke Gotszling told me. “It’s one thing to be alerted that your site is down, but it’s another thing to set up a rule that fixes it. This is going to be a lot more valuable.”

It’s done by creating rules that can be used to set automated parameters around Amazon Web Services offerings that include EC2, RDS, and DynamoDB. By setting up a series of if-this-then-that scenarios, it can automate tasks that can help keep their cloud services working, even in the case of an unprecedented emergency.

With the update, users can have storage capacity automatically added to RDS database instances when usage passes a certain threshold. They can stop and restart EC2 instances that degrade over time, in response to failed status checks or CPU utilization, all of which can help them from suffering a more serious failure.

Users who rely on DynamoDB can also use Finally.io to instantly scale service up or down based on actual usage, increasing during high-traffic times and scaling down during slower periods.

The rules can also be used to test the resilience of a client’s infrastructure. Using a process similar to Netflix’s famed Chaos Monkey, the service allows users to create controlled scenarios that allow random stops and restarts of various EC2 instances to see if that breaks their infrastructure.

Finally.io was founded by Gotszling and Alex Bendig, who were both early employees at About.me. The new feature is being sold based on the number of instances or DynamoDB tables that are covered by each rule, and is generally available to customers now.