How do you publish your application events?
I used to get notification for my application events having my services sending emails to myself. Even though this is a good way to get notified, it has some issues:
-
I was consuming the quota of free emails allowed by my email provider for internal use and not for my customer emails.
-
There was no easy way to traverse the history of those emails and try to define data patterns of get analytics out of it.
For these reasons I started thinking about how I could build a service which would solve those pain points and allow me to receive events notifications more easily. The result is a TrakrLog
This time, I am following a different approach for this project. I am not going to write a single line of code (landing page excluded), until I don' t validate the idea and see some kind of traction from potential customers.
At this purpose I decided to release a landing page which would explain what the service would do, what would be the benefits and then just show a waiting list form.
If I see enough people joining the waiting list, then I will start building the service full speed!
What you think? Is this a better approach instead of building an entire platform with no clients?
Hi Andy, good idea. I had a similar idea before but didn't go anywhere due to a lack of resources for further development/validation.
Do you want to get together for a quick brainstorm to see what can be leveraged for quality service (real-time, visualization, time series, alerts, slack integration, etc.) in a short time, and focus on marketing validation? I think an honest partnership could make this go as fast as possible.
Refer to this for what I ever tried (a bit) - https://columns.ai/build, available to chat anytime.
Similar to what @mkinoshi12 said, I just fire off events to Slack for things I want to get notified about. It's really easy for me to setup now, though admittedly there was a bit of a learning curve.
For other events I send them off to Mixpanel.
What could be interesting though is some proactive summary reporting on my events: How many sign ups did I get last week? How many people logged in? How many purchases at what price point, all sent to men in a daily/weekly digest. That would be cool.
I know I could go to Mixpanel and review that but it would be nice if it just came to me. Perhaps in Slack?
Analytics would be a big part of trakrlog. I have ideas to show those logs data in charts.
I also would add tags to log messages, so the user can categorize them, better search them as well.
Add push notifications as well.
Doesn't feel like an added value to slack notifications?
I just send it to Slack via webhooks. It’s been working well for me. If I didn’t set up the Slack integration, then I might want a simpler solution. But you can set it up with an hour of work at maximum, so it’s not too bad!
I hope you can find your niche!
Thanks!
I think slack is a good way to keep things simple, I would argue that you would miss the analytics side, tagging, push notifications, searching etc.. that would be possible with a dedicated service by the way.
Hey, do some research. I think I don't understand your use-case but both sentry.io and mixpanel gives you alert options on events.
Hi, sentry is more for code coverage and code analysis. My idea is to provide a service which would allow to receive notifications coming from your application at runtime, things like:
These are very basic examples, but I hope I gave you a gist of what I mean.
that is why I mentioned mixpanel, how mixpanel does not solve this?
mixpanel serves a much bigger purpose and it is not only focused on events. It is more like a Google Analytics alternative.
I am targeting users which would use Slack or Discord or Telegram or Emails to receive simple event notifications without sending tons of data to an external service.
I am still not following? I want to know whenever a new user sign up, correct? So I can only send that event and add an alert on that. I am still confused on how this is not solving the problem?
PS: I can do the same thing on the backend using sentry
Didn't know sentry could do that! Very good!
Yes you can.
So, my opinion on this is, this definitely is a problem, people want notifications, but if you think this is true only for early stages. If I am getting 100 signups daily, I wouldn't want it. So eventually you users would churn to solutions of event tracking and BI/analytics systems like mixpanel.
But maybe sentry is not multi tenant for your customers. But is it a tool for developers? I would stay away from selling to developers...