5 ms·

Show HN: DevRaven – Monitoring for Developers

46 points by kc10 4y ago

Hi HN! I am Krishna Thota, founder of DevRaven. DevRaven is a monitoring platform for Developers. DevRaven enables engineering teams or individual developers to setup active monitoring for their services/applications and get alerted when things don't work as expected Today's launch makes available the following features: API Monitoring - Monitor your HTTP end points and perform no-code or scripted assertions. Synthetic Monitoring - Execute browser based end-to-end tests using Playwright framework. No setup required. SSL Monitoring - Monitor SSL certificates for your end points and get alerted before they expire. Web Page Monitoring - Run continuous Lighthouse audits on your web pages to ensure best performance, SEO. Welcome any feedback, questions or suggestions.

paulgb 4y ago
This is very timely for something I've been wanting to do! Giving it a try now. Edit: tried it. I like it, I hadn't used playwright before but it was fairly straightforward to set up the test I wanted. Since you requested feedback, some thoughts: - I started by writing and testing my check locally, and then copied it over into a “synthetic test”. It would be cool if that were more seamless, e.g. if all of my tests were configured through a git repo and DevRaven had a GitHub webhook that was notified when the config changed. - I had to double-escape some backslashes in my code for it to be accepted, you might be eating the escapes during some string processing? - It would be cool to see timings of tests (i.e. the time between individual asserts as reported by playwright, but even the overall time would be a useful metric). - This is probably just my inexperience with playwright, but it would be nice to have an example that used playwright's expect function instead of chai. - TypeScript support would also be nice.
- kc10 4y ago
  Thanks Paul for the feedback. - ya, great idea to be able to pull the changes via git. - I will look into the issue. edit: confirmed a bug. - The overall time is captured and is shown in the logs. The dashboard view will be available very soon showing the execution time. - I will add an example to the recipes for expect as well. - Agreed on TypeScript support. I will check the feasibility to support on current stack.
  - kc10 4y ago
    update: double-escape issue is now fixed.
    - paulgb 4y ago
      That was fast! Cheers.
leetrout 4y ago
Nice work! Any plans to support cron monitoring / time of day monitoring? Something akin to cronitor?
- kc10 4y ago
  Thanks! The idea is to expand the feature set depending on user feedback. Cron monitor is on my radar. Is there something you don't like in Cronitor?
CSMastermind 4y ago
Hi Krishna, congrats on the launch! I really like that you have the 'try with no credit card' offering, I wish more companies would do this. One question I'd have for you is how _your_ services are hosted. If my service is hosted on AWS us-east-1 and so is my monitoring I'll be worried that I'm not going to get alerted when AWS itself has problems. It seems to me that you're entering into a crowded market. I can think of a dozen or more companies with similar offering. How do you plan on differentiating yourself? Who is the target user for your product and why would they select it instead of a competitor?
- kc10 4y ago
  Thanks! Our service is hosted in GCP today. Yes, it's totally possible that alerts may not be sent out or delayed if the regions where we hosted our services are down. I will definitely look into how we can mitigate such issues. It is a crowded space. But the market opportunity is also huge. I think pretty much any business is a software business. Our main idea is to expand the suite to various other areas of monitoring and be the single platform for monitoring anything.
Sytten 4y ago
What differentiate you from the number of existing monitoring platforms? Genuinely curious as it is a crowded space with a lot of established players.
- kc10 4y ago
  Definitely the space is crowded. But there are wide spectrum of maturity of engineering teams and how much they monitor. I think the features we have today are the baseline for any monitoring solution. But the idea is to expand and build a single platform to monitor anything that developers would like to monitor.
  - ushakov 4y ago
    > a single platform to monitor anything that developers would like to monitor a jack of all trades, master of none
    - kc10 4y ago
      IMO, nothing wrong with offering core functionality for various types of monitors that works for majority cases.
      - ushakov 4y ago
        please think for a moment what you’ve just said you said you could offer me a tool that does many different things, but nothing specific but, as a potential customer i would be looking for a tool that could solve my specific problem now think about that…
        kc10 4y ago
        Thanks for the feedback. I will definitely keep it mind as I navigate through the startup journey.
        4y ago
bdcravens 4y ago
How many is on the DevRaven team?
- kc10 4y ago
  I am a solo founder, but will be onboarding a co-founder very soon.
jibnair 4y ago
Love the simplicity !
leonardinius 4y ago
Hi Krishna, Great product you have put there. What is the long term plan wrt pricing, what should I expect if I sign up? Like the clarity of the home page, well done and good luck!
- kc10 4y ago
  Thanks! The free SKU allow you to start setting up and try out monitoring. You can change to paid SKU when you are ready to run more than 10000 API checks/month or 2500 synthetic checks/months. We do not have per seat pricing. It's purely usage based and you can purchase additional checks as you go.
ushakov 4y ago
why would i use your proprietary product when there are (lots!) of open-source alternatives available?
- hunterb123 4y ago
  time
- kc10 4y ago
  Whether to use a SaaS service or build something in-house is a choice for your engineering organization. But in most cases, people just want to use something that works so they can spend on their time and resources on building their own apps/services.
hunterb123 4y ago
This is an area that needs to be fleshed out, so far the best solution I've found is https://checklyhq.com/ https://checklyhq.com/ Playwright + other monitoring checks as a service is amazing. You do have to make your tests pretty resilient to prevent false positives through (retry on network issues etc.) The Playwright test framework helps with that.
- kc10 4y ago
  Playwright is amazing. Tests are reliable compared to other frameworks and work on all browsers. That's the reason we use Playwright for running our Synthetic tests. Checkly is in the market for the last 5+ years and they are definitely feature rich compared to DevRaven. But functionally pretty similar.
a-dub 4y ago
this looks nice. generous free tier! seconding the idea that it would be nice if gitops (flat config files in git) was a first class interface to configure everything. that would be a differentiator for me.
- kc10 4y ago
  Thanks. Completely agree with your feedback on git being the config source for scripts.
  - a-dub 4y ago
    i'd consider going a step further and making the web ui completely optional for configuration after the billing is set up. i know that sounds extreme, but personally that is something i would really, really like. maybe a small cli tool that gives me a template config file that i can then edit and and then run again manually or via ci to apply my changes. that may be extreme and reflective of my personal preferences, so grains of salt are warranted. :)
    - kc10 4y ago
      :-) I will definitely spike it asap and make it as simple as possible to setup and run via a git repo.
dogweather 4y ago
I use Checkly. Any idea how this compares?
- kc10 4y ago
  Checkly is also in the same space and has been in the market for 5+ years. So, it's definitely feature rich compared to DevRaven. But the core functionality is same for both the products i.e. the ability to run browser checks or API checks at scheduled intervals. We will mature and add more features as we go.
wdb 4y ago
Never understand why these kind of services only support PagerDuty. What about Opsgenie
- kc10 4y ago
  hi, it's just a matter of prioritization and time given the resources. I will look into adding Opsgenie support very soon.
Witness13 4y ago

46 points by kc10 4y ago

paulgb 4y ago

This is very timely for something I've been wanting to do! Giving it a try now. Edit: tried it. I like it, I hadn't used playwright before but it was fairly straightforward to set up the test I wanted. Since you requested feedback, some thoughts: - I started by writing and testing my check locally, and then copied it over into a “synthetic test”. It would be cool if that were more seamless, e.g. if all of my tests were configured through a git repo and DevRaven had a GitHub webhook that was notified when the config changed. - I had to double-escape some backslashes in my code for it to be accepted, you might be eating the escapes during some string processing? - It would be cool to see timings of tests (i.e. the time between individual asserts as reported by playwright, but even the overall time would be a useful metric). - This is probably just my inexperience with playwright, but it would be nice to have an example that used playwright's expect function instead of chai. - TypeScript support would also be nice.

kc10 4y ago
Thanks Paul for the feedback. - ya, great idea to be able to pull the changes via git. - I will look into the issue. edit: confirmed a bug. - The overall time is captured and is shown in the logs. The dashboard view will be available very soon showing the execution time. - I will add an example to the recipes for expect as well. - Agreed on TypeScript support. I will check the feasibility to support on current stack.
- kc10 4y ago
  update: double-escape issue is now fixed.
  - paulgb 4y ago
    That was fast! Cheers.

leetrout 4y ago

Nice work! Any plans to support cron monitoring / time of day monitoring? Something akin to cronitor?

kc10 4y ago
Thanks! The idea is to expand the feature set depending on user feedback. Cron monitor is on my radar. Is there something you don't like in Cronitor?

CSMastermind 4y ago

Hi Krishna, congrats on the launch! I really like that you have the 'try with no credit card' offering, I wish more companies would do this. One question I'd have for you is how _your_ services are hosted. If my service is hosted on AWS us-east-1 and so is my monitoring I'll be worried that I'm not going to get alerted when AWS itself has problems. It seems to me that you're entering into a crowded market. I can think of a dozen or more companies with similar offering. How do you plan on differentiating yourself? Who is the target user for your product and why would they select it instead of a competitor?

kc10 4y ago
Thanks! Our service is hosted in GCP today. Yes, it's totally possible that alerts may not be sent out or delayed if the regions where we hosted our services are down. I will definitely look into how we can mitigate such issues. It is a crowded space. But the market opportunity is also huge. I think pretty much any business is a software business. Our main idea is to expand the suite to various other areas of monitoring and be the single platform for monitoring anything.

Sytten 4y ago

What differentiate you from the number of existing monitoring platforms? Genuinely curious as it is a crowded space with a lot of established players.

kc10 4y ago
Definitely the space is crowded. But there are wide spectrum of maturity of engineering teams and how much they monitor. I think the features we have today are the baseline for any monitoring solution. But the idea is to expand and build a single platform to monitor anything that developers would like to monitor.
- ushakov 4y ago
  > a single platform to monitor anything that developers would like to monitor a jack of all trades, master of none
  - kc10 4y ago
    IMO, nothing wrong with offering core functionality for various types of monitors that works for majority cases.
    - ushakov 4y ago
      please think for a moment what you’ve just said you said you could offer me a tool that does many different things, but nothing specific but, as a potential customer i would be looking for a tool that could solve my specific problem now think about that…
      - kc10 4y ago
        Thanks for the feedback. I will definitely keep it mind as I navigate through the startup journey.
        4y ago

bdcravens 4y ago

How many is on the DevRaven team?

kc10 4y ago
I am a solo founder, but will be onboarding a co-founder very soon.

jibnair 4y ago

Love the simplicity !

leonardinius 4y ago

Hi Krishna, Great product you have put there. What is the long term plan wrt pricing, what should I expect if I sign up? Like the clarity of the home page, well done and good luck!

kc10 4y ago
Thanks! The free SKU allow you to start setting up and try out monitoring. You can change to paid SKU when you are ready to run more than 10000 API checks/month or 2500 synthetic checks/months. We do not have per seat pricing. It's purely usage based and you can purchase additional checks as you go.

ushakov 4y ago

why would i use your proprietary product when there are (lots!) of open-source alternatives available?

hunterb123 4y ago
time
kc10 4y ago
Whether to use a SaaS service or build something in-house is a choice for your engineering organization. But in most cases, people just want to use something that works so they can spend on their time and resources on building their own apps/services.

hunterb123 4y ago

This is an area that needs to be fleshed out, so far the best solution I've found is https://checklyhq.com/ https://checklyhq.com/ Playwright + other monitoring checks as a service is amazing. You do have to make your tests pretty resilient to prevent false positives through (retry on network issues etc.) The Playwright test framework helps with that.

kc10 4y ago
Playwright is amazing. Tests are reliable compared to other frameworks and work on all browsers. That's the reason we use Playwright for running our Synthetic tests. Checkly is in the market for the last 5+ years and they are definitely feature rich compared to DevRaven. But functionally pretty similar.

a-dub 4y ago

this looks nice. generous free tier! seconding the idea that it would be nice if gitops (flat config files in git) was a first class interface to configure everything. that would be a differentiator for me.

kc10 4y ago
Thanks. Completely agree with your feedback on git being the config source for scripts.
- a-dub 4y ago
  i'd consider going a step further and making the web ui completely optional for configuration after the billing is set up. i know that sounds extreme, but personally that is something i would really, really like. maybe a small cli tool that gives me a template config file that i can then edit and and then run again manually or via ci to apply my changes. that may be extreme and reflective of my personal preferences, so grains of salt are warranted. :)
  - kc10 4y ago
    :-) I will definitely spike it asap and make it as simple as possible to setup and run via a git repo.

dogweather 4y ago

I use Checkly. Any idea how this compares?

kc10 4y ago
Checkly is also in the same space and has been in the market for 5+ years. So, it's definitely feature rich compared to DevRaven. But the core functionality is same for both the products i.e. the ability to run browser checks or API checks at scheduled intervals. We will mature and add more features as we go.

wdb 4y ago

Never understand why these kind of services only support PagerDuty. What about Opsgenie

kc10 4y ago
hi, it's just a matter of prioritization and time given the resources. I will look into adding Opsgenie support very soon.

Witness13 4y ago