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> Their profit margin is usually in their efficiency in doing it better than you This is a very nice way of framing the question. I think there may be at leas
by snewman 7y ago
> Their profit margin is usually in their efficiency in doing it better than you
This is a very nice way of framing the question.
I think there may be at least two scenarios to consider. For some products, cost is primarily driven by R&D; for others, cost of operating the service (COGS) dominates. Of course it's a continuum, but I suspect there are more services near the ends than the middle.
For an R&D-dominated service, if your needs are nontrivial and there is an off-the-shelf product that is a decent fit, you probably want to go off-the-shelf. A commercial provider can amortize the R&D over a large customer base.
For a COGS-dominated service, the commercial provider may still be more efficient but it is less of a slam dunk. Log management (e.g. Splunk) involves a substantial operational component, because you're dealing with large volumes of data.
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Scalyr, a Splunk competitor. Early on we realized that, even though log management is COGS-heavy, we could achieve huge economies of scale, because query workloads are highly bursty. By carefully managing a central pool of resources shared by many clients, we're able to run much more efficiently than a single-tenant homegrown solution [1]. This is one of the key points that we highlight when having build vs. buy discussions with potential customers.
[1] https://www.scalyr.com/blog/searching-1tb-sec-systems-engineering-before-algorithms/ https://www.scalyr.com/blog/searching-1tb-sec-systems-engine...
- texasbigdata 7y agoSeeing how an enterprise software chooses to articulate and differentiate itself in product and sales from the internal perspective is super interesting. Are there other examples of "we chose to go to market like this (x, y, z reasons) and here's why"?
- snisarenko 7y agoHi snewman, I am currently using logdna as my splunk alternative, but it's not very good. Why should I try scalyr next, over the other alternatives ? My main constraint is the solution should be at least half as good as splunk, and cost less than $50 a month (I generate less than 1G a day). Your pricing seems to be reasonable. But how do you compare to splunk on features ? Here are the other tools I am considering trying https://www.humio.com/ https://www.humio.com/ https://www.sumologic.com/ https://www.sumologic.com/ https://sematext.com/logsene/ https://sematext.com/logsene/ https://www.datadoghq.com/log-management/ https://www.datadoghq.com/log-management/ https://logz.io/pricing/ https://logz.io/pricing/ https://www.chaossearch.io/ https://www.chaossearch.io/ https://www.papertrail.com/ https://www.papertrail.com/ https://www.loggly.com/ https://www.loggly.com/ https://www.graylog.org/products/enterprise https://www.graylog.org/products/enterprise
- snewman 7y agoThanks for reaching out. It really depends on what you're looking for, and I don't want to hijack this thread with a long discussion, so feel free to reach out at https://scalyr.com/contact https://scalyr.com/contact. If you're focused on the power of the query language, then Splunk is the undisputed leader, but we are relatively strong as well; see https://app.scalyr.com/help/power-queries https://app.scalyr.com/help/power-queries. This iteration of our query language was launched last year and was a lot of fun to build -- the team allowed me to write a fair amount of the code. :-) You can find a more general overview at https://scalyr.com/product https://scalyr.com/product.
- snisarenko 7y agoMostly looking for decent query language, decent charting, and API to grab chart data. Seems like you guys fit the bill. I'll do the 30 day trial, and see how it goes. Thanks for the response.
- pianoben 7y agoI was an early Scalyr user circa 2014 or so, and have used Splunk at various gigs before and after. My current company is not a Scalyr customer and that makes me pretty sad - even back then, they were snappy and responsive in ways that Splunk has never matched. Despite (maybe due to?) being substantially cheaper, the service we received from the founders and operators was second to none; for example, I remember that someone even hand-wrote a Clojure EDN log-parser for us at no extra charge, just to make sure we were happy. Steve says elsewhere in the thread that Splunk has the more-flexible query language, and while that may be true I as a product engineer never noticed the delta myself. TL;DR I think you'd be doing yourself a favor to try Scalyr, and I have no affiliation other than being a happy former customer.
- snisarenko 7y agoThanks. This is helpful information.
- cthuen 7y ago