This is what I love about Pivotal Tracker. Its simple, provides visibility & priorities, and isn't process heavy. As a developer its a dream as it lets us manage tasks as either in-progress, scheduled (backlog), or unscheduled (ice box). We can provide weekly status updates based on our velocity, plan out projects, and easily adjust based on changing need. I love it and I absolutely hated the mico-managing, proccess centric, painfully slow VersionOne. I also found the uber macro-management with clear no direction and secrecy frustrating, but at least it enabled the freedom to be productive. But Pivitol, wow... that's one tool that will make your developers happy. (No association, just happy user)

This design is similar to how Rearden was going to deploy Splunk. It was to replace OpsConsole (log analysis, JMX monitoring, alerting). I think there were performance issues, so we ended up with neither. Flume looks like a nice addition. On a name coincidence, you may find Google's paper on FlumeJava interesting. It provides an workflow optimizer for Map/Reduce. (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1806596.1806638)