Feedback from someone that's previously (long before the devops scene exploded) looked at commercializing a system like this:

Your UI should integrate monitoring and control using an actually visual interface detached from any underlying model used for state collection or implementation of state changes (because this stuff changes constantly, regardless of how much myopic VC money is thrown at it). This means instead of talking about "recipes" and suchlike, you talk explicitly about the objects being managed: services, servers, racks, PDUs, switches, routers, coolers, links, and so on.

Make it visual, like actually beautifully visual. Let me specify a floor diagram that colours each rack according to the mean health of the machines it contains. Clicking the rack should show an exploded view of each machine coloured by the mean health of each service they contain, and those services' dependencies. Provide instantly selectable overlays showing different kinds of topological relations (application/network/power/trust/routing/OAM/TCP connection state(!)) existing within the view (complete with colouring).

I want a tool that lets me study a floor diagram and instantly notice a set of racks are down because they are in a row supplied by a single PDU. I want to correlate crashes visually due to cooling hotspots, preferably even by relative colouring due to temperature sensors in the machines. I want to batch shutdown a set of machines connected to the NFS share I just found 0day on.

I want a generic visualization of a service that displays a set of vital metrics (error count, load, cpu usage) and a set of generic actions (restart, stop). I want a simple editor that allows me to assemble widgets ("CPU load gauage", "requests/sec gauge", "dependency health indicator") into some meaningful representation of a service using nothing but a mouse.

Don't bake any topology into it: make it useful for systems as small as 2 cores, or as large as having presence in every country. Racks aren't first class objects, they aren't containers, they're relations with some useful attributes. Don't bake implementation or buzz technologies into it: your codebase could be less than 10,000 lines JS+high level language backend.

Don't freeze out keyboard cowboys: there's no reason a highly visual UI need require a mouse. An idiom involving a handful of standard shortcuts ("object select", "object query", "object manipulate", "back", "bookmark", "assign shortcut") are all that's needed. I imagined a system involving keys 0-9 being redefinable (think Command & Conquer, not Emacs) with a few letters preassigned (think Gmail/Google Reader)

I want a UI no less visually beautiful than Google's search globe ( http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search ) for monitoring the state of my service. I want to notice the bandwidth spike occurring on the dark side of the earth.

Prior to a system like this that can be assembled with a minimum of fuss, and can be integrated with existing data sources and systems (most medium sized companies already have an asset database, etc.), I'm not going to be impressed by some crappy Ruby on Rails jammed together with a bit of JS as a fancy editor for some DSL.

Give us something with wow factor, not just another bland excuse of crap offering zero benefits over a command line, that'll end up lying dead in a Github repo in a few years.

[Footnote: for anyone with cash interested in systems like these, feel free to get in touch. I can barely enunciate correctly when talking about this stuff, my vision for what devops should look like is so far removed from the current popular state that it pains me to pay it much attention]