I will call your digression and raise with a further digression: there really seems to be an abundance of these cloud metric startups now. It's quiet bewildering to think the trivial python scripts I wrote in '09 to gather server and application stats (tomcat) could've been the basis for one of these. If only I'd had the vision.
There is still time. I don't like using any of the cloud metric services with a few exceptions, because I don't feel they are getting a large segment of the market that is undervalued: sysadmins. Most of us are on very tight budgets already, and while tools like splunk and boundary are pretty awesome visually and in the ease of use department, as soon as I start getting back the numbers I get sticker shock, especially because I want to monitor much more than seems to be the norm for their target markets.
This is one of the many reasons why I think FOSS with a support model has so much potential in the sysadmin world. Tool is FOSS, so you can use it as much as you want (no 50c per device schemes) and then if you want support or a hosted version that's what is charged for.
No one is really doing this, though there are a handful of non-foss "open-source" projects around that give you free versions with restricted feature-sets.
As a side note, I have been using Argus (http://argus.tcp4me.com/) and ELK stack to good effect.
