9 ms·
Show HN: Keep – GitHub Actions for your monitoring tools
Hi Hacker News! Shahar and Tal from Keep here.
A few months ago, we introduced here at HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34806482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34806482) Keep as an “open source alerting CLI” and got some interesting feedback - mainly around UI, automation, and supporting more tools. We were VERY early back then, and we understood that although the current DX around creating alerts is not great, it's not that critical and developers don’t need another tool just for that.
But we did find something else.
While talking to developers and devops, we found that a lot of companies use many tools that generate alerts - from Cloudwatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog to tools such as Zabbix or Nagios. We definitely agree consolidation in the observability space is a real thing, but while talking to those companies we feel that there are still real use cases for having more than one tool (and for example, according to Grafana’s 2023 observability survey, 52% of the companies uses more than 6 observability tools https://grafana.com/observability-survey-2023/ https://grafana.com/observability-survey-2023/).
So we that in mind, we rebuilt Keep with a simple mindset: (1) Integrate with every tool that triggers alerts - it can be either pushing alerts to Keep via webhooks or routing policies or Keep to pull alerts via the tools API. (2) Create a simple abstraction layer to run workflows on top of these alerts. (3) Maintain a great developer experience - open source, API-first, workflows as code and generally having a developer mindset while building Keep.
During the time we rebuilt Keep, Datadog released their workflow automation tool (https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_management/workflows/ https://docs.datadoghq.com/service_management/workflows/) which led us to the understanding that's exactly what we solve - but for everyone who uses tools other than Datadog.
A short demo of Keep with a simple use case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPMRCZM8ZYg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPMRCZM8ZYg
You can try it yourself by signing into https://platform.keephq.dev https://platform.keephq.dev
Like always - we invite you to try Keep and we are eager to hear any feedback.
- adamcohenhillel 3y ago[dead]
- nadavwiz 3y ago[dead]
- folivore 3y agoThis genuinely seems useful. I’ll give it a shot. Nice!
- shahargl 3y agolet me know how I can help
- erulabs 3y agoHaha my team maintains something just like this this internally - ours is called “info-radiator”. Great idea for a product. You should add an Amazon referral link to a small Lenovo tablet and some Velcro for developers to have a dedicated Keep monitor!
- talboren 3y agothanks! happy to help your team migrate to Keep and send out a few complimentary monitors ;)
- CodeAlong 3y agoLooks really interesting! Does the self-hosted version support OAuth or other authentication methods to manage users through an external identity provider?
- talboren 3y agoSelf hosted version supports both single tenant mode (no users/login at all) or multi tenant mode where you can configure your own auth0 account and work with all of their supported IDPs. It’s not so well documented but I can have that documented ASAP
- OJFord 3y agoIMO the readme docs make it seem confusingly like it's built-in/really well integrated with Actions, because the syntax is so similar. It takes some light digging to find it's actually entirely separate (but similar) and run as `keeo run --alerts-file=path`, from GH Actions or anything else at all, because it's a separate file parsed by a third-party program that just so happens to have a similar syntax. Nice tool though, looks useful, added to the list.
- talboren 3y agothanks for the feedback here, that’s really important for us and we actually just refactored the readme a couple of days ago. any concrete action item you’d suggest?
- OJFord 3y agoTry to read it as someone approaching the whole project for the first time, particularly the 'Workflows' section, it just doesn't really make sense, kind of implies there's something special about running it in GitHub Actions (maybe it means to say that the syntax is similar?) and doesn't tell you how to actually pass the Keep workflow file to keep (which is what will parse it, not GH Actions) at all. Start with `keep run --actions-file`, then show the file format. Don't mention specific CI/CD, it's not relevant.
- shahargl 3y agowould "datadog workflow automation alternative" would sounds more reasonable? we did want to do that but people told us no one knows datadog workflow automation.
- slillibri 3y agoHonestly it would be better to just describe what your tool is, rather than trying to describe it in relation to something else. People know what workflow automation is, and people know what monitoring is. I was initially confused at what this product had to do with Github Actions. Also, it would do well to link to your website ( https://www.keephq.dev https://www.keephq.dev ) also, rather than just something that immediately prompts me to log in. And one final thing, having a demo video with some sort of narration to explain what I am watching people click on would also be helpful. Obviously these are just my opinions, and they are worth exactly what was paid for them :)
- oefrha 3y agoMaybe don’t call a reliability tool “GitHub Actions for X”, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence? Having used relatively high frequency GitHub Actions for alerts, I get more random errors from Actions (Actions down, failed git pull, failed cache pull, etc.) than actual alerts.
- smcleod 3y agoI was thinking just the same! When I think of Github Actions I think of horrific inline YAML scripting, missing core functionality, clunky UI and frequent outages.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- talboren 3y agolol yea, you’re definitely right. we should’ve mentioned something like “GitHub actions but reliable”. actually our readme mentions datadog workflow automation as a reference though people are less familiar with it
- shahargl 3y agoyea the original thought was "Datadog Workflow Automation" but too many people told us they don't know it.
- code_biologist 3y agoI've used Datadog as an application engineer for years (not an expert / ops person) and I just learned about Workflow Automation from this post... so good choice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- matsimitsu 3y agoWe have a similar internal tool, and it's also called keep! Besides alerts it also tracks, and displays things such as which MongoDB server is the primary, or which ElasticSearch node is the controller.
- shahargl 3y agowhats the odds. would be super interesting to talk, are you up for it?
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoSince this is 2023 and we are releasing things that solve X and Y problems in YML I do want to take the opportunity to question whether solving problem for X or Y in YML is really the thing we should be building businesses around these days. I’ve spent the greater part of the last year or so undoing the pain of “reasonably complex GHA in YML” in my organization. It’s one of those things that sounds great conceptually, and works really well simplistically, but once your use case evolves beyond even remotely simple (for example, abstracting and maintaining this code in an engineering org in the tens of people, not even hundreds), it is a slow growing cancer that ends up being a huge time suck, unmaintainable, untestable mess, and technical debt for your org.
- seperman 3y agoI have been working on a data validation tool for a while. I even tried creating an extended YAML parser for data validation. You made me realize I wasted my time with that approach. Better now than later. I would love to talk to you before I throw away more code. Can we connect?
- shahargl 3y agoHey! I've missed your reply here. Sent an email.
- doctorpangloss 3y agoYeah but people freak out when they see Gradle, Bash, Bazel, or even wacky raw Python. The real competition is, what will LLMs write better? Because I have zero interest in learning new DSLs, I just want whatever will be most text based to use through an LLM.
- lionkor 3y agoThen, honestly, you want it to write something that is statically verifyable
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoYou probably want python then. I think it's been well demonstrated that is probably the language with the largest amount of effort has gone into training LLM's to work with, in multiple facets.
- nstart 3y agoI'm looking at this and thinking, "you know what, this could be an awesome personal tool as well". This is definitely outside of the use cases described but I can definitely see myself hooking this up in an IFTTT style to funnel things into my todo systems using the HTTP provider. Will poke around this soon.
- shahargl 3y agothats definitely something we want people to do, use it for their small annoying manual things. in the end of the day I think this will help Keep become very user friendly.
- rozenmd 3y agoThis looks great! I'm the maker of an alert-generating tool (OnlineOrNot), how would I go about adding an integration for Keep?
- talboren 3y agowell actually documentation around that is still under construction (https://docs.keephq.dev/development/adding-a-new-provider https://docs.keephq.dev/development/adding-a-new-provider) but adding a new integration (provider in our terms) to Keep is a piece of cake! happy to chat in our Slack (https://slack.keephq.dev https://slack.keephq.dev) or over a zoom, what ever works for you :)
- perlgeek 3y agoHow does that compare to similar existing tools like StackStorm?
- talboren 3y agoi think a few major points would be: 1. we're much more integrated and focused on the tools (and even more specifically on the monitoring tools), we actually integrate with their APIs and not only receive events from. 2. trying to be a lot simpler, modern UI, zero-clicks concepts, etc. 3. they're super cool and we learn a lot from them
- Jayakumark 3y agoDoes it do Rollup’s and how is it different from Stackstorm st2
- talboren 3y agowdym by "Rollup's"? I answered re:stackstorm st2 in another comment: > i think a few major points would be: 1. we're much more integrated and focused on the tools (and even more specifically on the monitoring tools), we actually integrate with their APIs and not only receive events from. 2. trying to be a lot simpler, modern UI, zero-clicks concepts, etc. 3. they're super cool and we learn a lot from them
- Jayakumark 3y agoIn your demo, the message for disk space keeps repeating but we just need one alert instead of 100s , also good would be flap detection when something flaps up/down, and auto remediation that it was resolved.
- shahargl 3y agothe demo is super simple and we just send a slack message for every Prometheus alert, so if you would fine tune Prometheus it would resolve it. In addition, we have few throttling strategies that we didn't show in the demo. Last, we will add flap detection!
- gorenb 3y agoThis is similar to something I saw before: https://n8n.io https://n8n.io