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Hey everyone. I'm a co-founder / CTO of LogDNA. We were in Y Combinator's W15 batch working on a eCommerce marketing platform (PushMarket), only to realize we b
by leeab 11y ago
Hey everyone. I'm a co-founder / CTO of LogDNA. We were in Y Combinator's W15 batch working on a eCommerce marketing platform (PushMarket), only to realize we built a powerful logging system many of our friends wanted.
We had our “slack moment” and decided to pivot. We were frustrated with the current logging landscape and built LogDNA around 3 philosophies:
1. More Storage - give away ample storage so you can log everything
2. Longer Search - faster and longer search retention
3. UI/UX - a much cleaner experience to interact with your log tails
I’m happy to answer any questions you may have!
- jc_811 11y agoHi! Looks really great at first glance. Is there anything you guys do that differentiates yourself from other log management platforms (eg Kibana, Splunk, etc)
- leeab 11y agoMainly the 3 items we mentioned above. Technically, building a scalable infrastructure to ingest an order of magnitude of GBs more than other platforms was a bit challenging (and still is) but I think we're on our way to achieving that.
- ebouck 11y agoWe've been using the product for a few months now after have looked at most of the alternatives. The biggest differentiators for me have been: 1. Really straightforward, scriptable installation 2. Intuitive view of the log data 3. Very quick and easy to select a time frame 4. UI is oriented to cope with lots of server creation/destruction (very useful for auto-scaling environments and not well handled in some of the other products) We are very happy with the product - great job guys!
- leeab 11y agoMany thanks @ebouck!
- kazazes 11y agoAre there any client libraries for LogDNA or does it just stream /var/log/* and other logs to LogDNA? Also, you provide APTs and RPMs, but no sources. Is there any way I can build LogDNA and run it on Arch Linux?
- zeisss 11y agoI was also looking for documentation of how to forward data to them. Its probably only available after login.
- leeab 11y agoAhh yes documentation...we're also working on that as we speak. Sorry about that...we had to pick and choose what we could have for launch. But the instructions on logdna.com should be enough to get you started.
- leeab 11y agoClient libraries are coming soon! We decided on an agent mainly for ease of installation and so we can self-update the agent, so you don't have to manage it (especially for auto-scaling environments). We will be open sourcing our agent soon, we literally launched this week...some things we couldn't get to for launch. And yes, it currently streams /var/log/* by default and any other paths your specify to the agent.
- Gigablah 11y ago> We will be open sourcing our agent soon Great! I want to stick it in a Docker container.
- atmosx 11y agologstash/filebeat integration would make sense actually.
- tyre 11y agoYour marketing seems to emphasize storage heavily. Is that the biggest pain point in logging today? If so, my guess would be that retention period could be a bigger differentiator than sheer gigabytes. What's the killer use case or differentiator (vs. loggly+kibana+elasticsearch for example)? With Slack, it is integrations. If you could do something similar, like a bugsnag + new relic that aggregates all of our logs and notifies us when things happen (either individual incidents or aggregates like "nginx error log above 1 event/10s), you can have all my money. Another idea would be to standardize transactions across the stack, so I could trace a request from nginx through rails/phoenix, to postgresql, etc. Again, take my money. A better UI only helps me if I know when to look at it or what I'm looking for.
- leeab 11y agoYup we will be doing some of the items you mentioned. But you gotta start somewhere and launch something. This is just our mvp. :)
- tyre 11y agoI hear you and congrats on the launch! To be clear, I'm not asking that you have all of this out of the gate. It's that I want to see the vision and get excited about where you're heading. Your early users are investing in your future and taking a bet on what you could become. Right now, I'm not sure what I should be dreaming about.
- leeab 11y agoYou're absolutely right...it's important to clarify the vision. Our vision is to do analytics in the future. Today it's aggregate/search/tail/alerting. I think the beauty of this is that our future is still somewhat unknown and we'll listen to our customers on where we ought to be headed.
- tyre 11y agoFor _you_ the unknown future may be exciting, but as a customer it isn't. I'm trusting you with a critical part of my infrastructure and betting that you're the future of logging. If I'm going to make that bet, I have to believe that you have a clear vision and that I'm on board with that. Obviously internally (as a fellow founder), things are always crazy and you adapt and grow. But your customers need more than the faith that you'll figure it out as you go.
- maerF0x0 11y agoThe more storage thing seems disingenuous . Splunk's biggest plan is 3x yours. It seems that your real offer is just price per storage atm. More for the same money. infact only splunk light competes with you on price but on not storage GBs.
- leeab 11y agoI don't think we'll be targeting enterprise users like Splunk...especially since their featureset will take a long time to build out. We might be one day but not today. Yes, you are correct, more value for your money is our current offer. We want to build a great product and to do that, you have to hire great people, so we came up with a pricing that'll hopefully achieve that. But it's not set in stone and we'll adjust just like any other company.
- maerF0x0 11y ago> We want to build a great product and to do that, you have to hire great people, so we came up with a pricing that'll hopefully achieve that. None of that is customer value. Pricing must favor my needs over any of your company's long term goals.
- mbesto 11y agoHow do you differentiate against https://papertrailapp.com/ https://papertrailapp.com/ ?
- welder 11y ago100GB/month doesn't matter when you only store the logs for 2 days... Why does your free plan have such a short retention time? Is the 2 day retention time because you sync logs to the user's s3 bucket? If so then it would help conversion to say that next to the 2 days retention copy.
- leeab 11y agoWe had a specific audience in mind when we chose 2 days. We were targeting users who just needed to debug their apps, or a low traffic production app. For this, 2 days is plenty. The space is there mainly so they won't have to think about that 5GB/month may equal to 160mb/day or if a bug floods their logs and pushes them over their quota or dealing with overages. If you care about retention, chances are you're also building a serious product and you want to rely on LogDNA to be around. For that, we hope you'll be on a paid plan. We want to build the best product we can and by charging appropriately, we can afford better people.
- welder 11y agoThanks for the reply. Is it possible to sync logs to s3 for backup after then 2 day retention period?
- tudborg 11y agoDamn, this is _exactly_ what I just started building... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well, It looks really nice!
- agopaul 11y agoIf I were you, I would put a little emphasis on the security of your service. Logs can definitely contain sensitive data and companies rely on you to store that data in a "proper" way. At least, as a possible customer, that is one of my biggest concern. But maybe I'm just too focused on security given that our clients ask us about it pretty much every day. So as a possible vendor (for us or other SaaS businesses) and being part of our chain of trust, I'd expect some words on how you handle security and how much it is important for you. That is lacking on the website if I'm correct. Anyway, congrats on the service! I think that there is room for LogDNA in the logging-warehousing market
- leeab 11y agoYes, thanks for the feedback. We'll be adding this and a FAQ section soon. We do encrypt everything in transit, end-to-end, just like most in our industry. We do not encrypt at rest at the moment but will be looking into it.
- illumin8 11y agoNot encrypting at rest seems like a huge oversight, given that your service most likely uses AWS S3 and it is dead simple to turn on encryption. I'm not sure anyone will trust you to store their log data without at least encrypting data at rest.
- toomuchtodo 11y agohttp://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingEncryption.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingEncrypti... It's literally setting a policy on a bucket and a flag on object PUTs if you're not managing the keys yourself.
- leeab 11y agoYes we do plan to be doing this for S3 archives.
- Rauchg 11y agoAwesome stuff leeab!
- leeab 11y agoThanks @Rauchg
- kordless 11y agoHappy to see the shell back in action somewhere. Well done!
- samstave 11y agoHIPAA Compliance?
- leeab 11y agoNot yet. We're still figuring our what's needed for this. It seems there's no auditing requirement at all.
- samstave 11y agoI want to help you figure this out. Email in profile.
- mateo411 11y agoYou must encrypt the logs at Rest. Also, if you are dealing with a production issue with HIPPA logs, you must keep them on the machine. You can't send anything in an email, send a stack trace over a messaging client, or put them into JIRA.
- dmmalam 11y agoI'd love to have all logs stored from day 1 (ie unlimited retention). Makes looking for bugs a million times easier, when you don't need to open up archived logs from S3. Might be an interesting technical challenge to the keep search fast with 100gbs of logs.
- welder 11y agoThey delete the logs after 2 days (free plan) and 60 days (most expensive plan available). The 100GB is only monthly transfer. Would be nice to have a cloud log service with unlimited retention that's searchable, but for now self-hosting is the best choice using logstash [1] for logging and statsd [2] for metrics. [1] https://github.com/elastic/logstash https://github.com/elastic/logstash [2] https://github.com/etsy/statsd https://github.com/etsy/statsd
- zobzu 11y agoHey it looks like your debian/main page install path does not sign packages or use any trusted channel.
- ldoroud 11y agoDNA is normally and naturally right-handed which means your logo is wrong!
- ghayes 11y agoQuick question, is https://heroku.logdna.com https://heroku.logdna.com down? Doesn't look like my logs are coming in and wondering if this is the HN hug of death? > curl: (7) Failed to connect to heroku.logdna.com port 443: Connection refused
- lobster_johnson 11y agoThe CLI looks interesting. Can I use it to pipe logs to you? That would be really useful for, say, running scripts and maintenance jobs on a bunch of boxes. That would allow me to collect data and inspect it later (or tail it live). Oh, and I see you provide an OS X package for the tool. I'd vastly prefer a Homebrew package over that.
- whalesalad 11y agoLogging definitely sucks. It all sucks. Graylog. Elasticsearch and Kibana. Don't even get me started on Logstash which is some of the worst software I've ever used. When you have a Docker/Kubernetes solution I will be (at another YC company) very interested in putting it through it's paces. Also I'd agree with others here that having a command line tail interface as well as a gui for browsing and savable queries would be bitchin.
- agopaul 11y agoCould you elaborate on Logstash? I was considering it just a few weeks ago for a project
- rtv 11y agoFinally a product I can make my work more efficient, thank you this is what I've been searching for, We will definitely hire you :)