Hi, I'm the author of Riemann. This part of the documentation is aimed at people who already know what Riemann is, so your confusion is completely understandable! :)

In short, Riemann is a complex event processor, driven by Clojure configuration, oriented towards monitoring distributed software systems. There's an introduction to its features and concepts here:

http://aphyr.github.com/riemann/

You can watch me try to justify my crimes against computers here:

http://vimeo.com/38377415

And here's some slides!

http://t.co/9BKdufal

If there's any questions I can answer, happy to help. You're also welcome to stop by #riemann on freenode. Cheers!

Fear not, weary HackerNewser, for I've got you covered throughout your treacherous quest for deeper knowledge. What I've been able to do is apply my in-depth experience at link clicking and text selection - both tasks which I've only needed to apply one time only, in this particular instance, in order to provide you with everything you're looking for:

"Riemann aggregates events from your servers and applications with a powerful stream processing language. Send an email for every exception raised by your code. Track the latency distribution of your web app. See the top processes on any host, by memory and CPU. Combine statistics from every Riak node in your cluster and forward to Graphite. Send alerts when a key process fails to check in. Know how many users signed up right this second."