In a typical software project its not uncommon to have multiple environments: QA, performance, staging, production and such. There are also multiple people interested knowing the status of the environments - devs, testers, analysts and others. Usually this information is available to devs and sysadmins, and so they have to look it up for everyone else. As the number of environments and people grows, it starts taking too much of everyone's time to continously go through devs and sysadmins. So ESP aims to alleviate this problem by providing a single central location to find all information about environments and allow people to do their own monitoring.

Given that environments vary enormously from project to project, ESP can't just work out of box for most projects. Collecting the environment data requires significant customization. Rather than build some evil custom configuration tool that is painful to use and doesn't do what you want anyway, we decided to provide an incredibly sexy and powerful tool you already know - Ruby. To customize you just write ruby code. As the project progresses we aim to provide some standard customizations like Websphere, but until that point we provide some examples for you to work off of.

There is nothing limiting you to just passively displaying data with ESP. It can also be the access point from which to administer your environments and deploy new versions of applications.