[josephruscio]

Another alternative is to consider a service that handles storage/visualization/alerting/etc for your time-series data. I work for a startup that does exactly that and there are other options in this space as well. Would love any feedback you guys might have: https://metrics.librato.com

[latchkey]

I'm so sorry, but I really don't see the value in spending $26.78/month for only 50 metrics. I could install Graphite on a small instance at AWS and get nearly unlimited metrics for a fraction of the cost.

Never mind the fact that if I point your tool at a JVM, I can quickly get over 50 metrics (and double my cost to $53.57 since your slider only goes in increments of 50) just by looking at a single ehcache instance.

Yes, your service is nice, your graphs are pretty, but at the end of the day, I think I'd have a hard time convincing my boss (me) that this is a valuable thing to spend a lot of money on.

It seems like a lot of these 'monitoring' companies are springing up these days. I feel bad for you because I see that industry quickly being commoditized into who offers the lowest price. It is also not the easiest problem to solve because of the data storage and availability requirements.

Anyway, I don't mean any ill will. I wish you the best in your business, I just don't see how it would work for me.

[josephruscio]

I appreciate you taking the time to look over our marketing content and giving your frank opinion :-), no ill will perceived at all. It helps us to know where we need to improve our communication around the value we are providing. In that spirit, I'll take a brief stab addressing some of your concerns here:

1) Your time is the most expensive resource. The cost of hosting your own solutions is almost always dwarfed by the cost of time you spend configuring it, maintaining it, and recovering it in the face of failures. We provide the same value here as any SaaS team in any vertical. We care and manage for the infrastructure and are constantly developing and rolling out new features. Of course the time needed to invest depends on one's time and experience, but we intend to save a lot of people a lot of time.

2.) A small EC2 instance costs $61/month and has finite disk bandwidth (and CPU). You might get more than 50 metrics, but it's going to come up a lot short of "nearly unlimited". Most people I know running serious Graphite installations end up needing collocated physical hardware with SSD's. That's going to cost you more like $1K-$2K/month. You will still have a SPOF unless you double that cost. We handle all the scaling and reliability for you.

3) Our pricing is completely linear per the number of metrics, the steps in the slider are just to make it easier to chunk around different numbers. There are no step-wise increases that double your costs. I appreciate your comment here as it had not occurred to me that someone might (reasonably) infer a stepwise increase in pricing.

4) We also include other valuable tools like threshold-based alerting on all your data streams with GUI integration to 3rd party services like Campfire, PagerDuty, Email, Custom Webhooks, with more to come.

5) A lot of 'monitoring' companies are springing up these days because the market is clamoring for it ;-). While some teams would rather handle these things in-house, a lot of other teams would rather focus on building their core business value and out-source infrastructure head-aches. It's the same economics pushing teams to outsource version-control, logging, hosting, etc.

[latchkey]

excellent response Joseph. Thanks. If I end up needing these services at some point, I'll definitely look into your company first.

[josephruscio]

Thanks! One more thing, right after hitting reply, I realized the numbers you saw sounded too high. So I checked out our pricing page and it turns out we had a regression in the estimator. 50 metrics reported every 60 seconds costs $4.46, not $26.78. For the $26.78 you can push 300 metrics every 60 seconds. Just pushed out a fix and it shows the correct values now, so this exchange was really helpful!

[relix]

Hey Joseph,

I myself was skeptical when reading OPs numbers, but if I can get reliable metrics like that for just $4.46 a month I might even consider using your service! You should definitely edit your post above to reflect that the price was too high for the numbers quoted, as maybe not everyone will read this far in the thread to discover it.

[latchkey]

Wow, that makes a HUGE difference in price. Now it makes a lot more sense and leaves me wondering about your QA practices. Just pulling your chain. ;-)

Anyway, the fact that you are responding here and being active would definitely make me feel like your company would be the first to check out. This is similar to how I feel about WePay as well. Their ceo and engineers read HN and respond to comments. It is the dawn of a new era of access and support.

Cheers.

[amirmansour]

Your service actually looks very interesting. Would you be able to tell us about your backend? How are you guys making it real-time? And how are you handeling storage?

[josephruscio]

Sure thing! Our backend is horizontally scalable and triply redundant by design. We have a web tier behind an ELB that runs our API (http://dev.librato.com/v1/post/metrics). It's implemented in Sinatra today. We'll probably switch to something more performant in the future, but for now it's cheaper to throw more instances behind the load-balancer and spend our time building out more features in the service.

When metrics come into one of the API instances, they turn around and insert it into a Cassandra cluster that we're running spread across 3 different availability zones with an RF factor of 3, meaning your data is stored in 3 different availability zones.

The "GET" calls to pull data out of our service go through the same API, so as soon as data is written to the cluster, it can be pulled back out. Hence the marketing term "realtime".