I've been in environments without any sense of monitoring; pingdom and esx health checks that provide only a tiny frame of reference to the real health of an application.<p>Being able to know the true health of a service is an absolute godsend.<p>So many times a service had been dead or gone for hours before anyone noticed (well our customers noticed, but it has to funnel up the pipeline from customer, to support, to engineering) before we were made aware of a real issue.<p>Nothing says good PR like not knowing you've been dead in the water for half a day and have no idea.