Logging & Monitoring solution for a tiny SaaS
Hi friends, I’m finishing my first project - https://prboard.dev and figuring out the final ops details. Mainly, I’m looking for cheap solutions to gather/search logs and a similar one for metrics.
At work, I use ELK stack and DataDog - it’s great but I can’t afford them for my tiny personal project. I’ve already found a cheap hosted logging solution - LogDNA, but not the monitoring one. Would appreciate any help and advice.
NOTE: I’m looking at spinning up my own Prometheus + Grafana, but, if possible, would prefer a SaaS solution.
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I'm on AWS, and I use:
I send all alerts to my own slack (even being a solo founder I use slack hehe)
I'm looking into using something like VictorOps. One of those kind of services have a free tier, but I don't remember wich one
Interesting, I didn't know Grafana Cloud has a free tier, thank you! Have you considered spinning up your own monitoring stack?
I love to code, and I can die if I don't code at least a little bit every week. But in my project I have to do so much stuff, that every opportunity to buy vs build is great for me.
Right now I'm limiting my "tech time" to the minimum. And instead I do marketing, sales, and strategic planning.
I would love to do a lot of tech stuff, but I just can't afford (in hours) it right now. I have to buy it.
Yep, totally get it. I share your mindset, but wonder if this is one of the situations when spending <1 day of work results in good savings and more features. Btw, is cloud watch a backend for your Grafana dashboards?
Is never less than a day hehe. On me daily job, the company almost never buy, and they like to build. And we end up with lots of barely working stuff, and lots of manual work.
Yeah, but I use very few custom metrics
Your website is damn good. Its simple and beautiful.
thank you, I feel happy about being able to design things on my own without involving a designer 🙌
I've been on the free tier of NewRelic.com for years, and it works well for me, but doesn't go in depth for database performance, so I am thinking of switching to AppSignal.com now that my SaaS is actually making good money.
Any chance you can point me to the pricing page on their website, it's quite challenging to navigate their product pages. Which of their products are you using?
Yeah, their pricing has always been hard to understand. I am on their APM product, and I don't think they still have their legacy free tier that I have been on for about 5 years now. This is their current APM pricing page:
https://newrelic.com/products/application-monitoring/pricing
I'd love to transition to their paid product, but even I cannot really understand their computer power based pricing. Much happier transitioning to the per server pricing that AppSignal has.
We offer server, log and web monitoring at nixstats.com -- Feel free to take a look at our live demo or signup for a free trial.
Hey Vincent! Never knew about nixstats, been checking it out. Do you have custom metrics? I tried to checkout the demo dashboard but I couldn't really find what I was looking for. I need to report custom metrics then generate charts and dashboards for my custom metrics. I don't really care about the rest of the bells and whistles (yet anyway). Is this possible with nixstats right now?
Hi John,
Yes you can build custom plugin using python, more one that here: https://help.nixstats.com/en/article/creating-a-custom-plugin-1ku5i0z/
On our dashboard you should be able to setup graphs with your own metrics and dashboards.
I'm really interested in your product :)
I will be trying it as soon as I can move to a VPS where I cant install the agent (I'm on fortrabbit now)
Have you considered adding Real User Monitoring (RUM)?
Yes next year we have plans for both RUM as well as APM. Currently we're working on the finishing touches of our Logging feature.
Logging is currently free (up to 10GB/day for 7 days).
YES PLEASE. I posted about this a while ago as well, but I got no response. You could post this on twitter, if you tag IndieHackers they will retweet and maybe get more responses.
As for me I stuck with logs on CloudWatch for now, its cheap even though searching is terrible. I still have no solution for custom metrics, CloudWatch is INSANELY expensive for custom metrics, its almost like they want to discourage you from using custom metrics. I searched through a lot of solutions for custom metrics including Datadog, Papertrail and a bunch of others. My conclusion is that most are too expensive for a scrappy startup. Even the entry level prices are so limited and simply just a way to get you to pay more later, and the next tier is always insanely more expensive. Some jump from $10/mo to about $500/mo 🤦🏾♂️
My plan was a self hosted Prometheus instance, however Prometheus doesn't even play nice with Docker just yet. Its just a painful situation to be in. Sounds like somebody needs to IndieHack the shit outta this 😭
I totally agree, there might be a good indie-product right here. I wonder if there's enough appetitive for a small-scale cheap monitoring solution to justify building one 🤔 Definitely requires some market research.
Curious what problems with Prometheus + Docker did you encounter? There's a repo with docker-compose for Prometheus + Grafana (https://github.com/vegasbrianc/prometheus) and it has lots of stars. It looks promising. Combining it with a cheap hosting (like Hertzner) might be a killer setup.
After reading about Prometheus and watching a conference talk by one of the providers, he mentioned that Docker and Prometheus don't play nicely just yet. Docker also added Prometheus support but its behind an experimental flag so I wasn't too excited about that.
Thanks for the link, and I'll check it out for sure but my stack currently runs on Fargate on AWS, if it works for me I'll definitely hop on it 👍🏾
Did you end up settling on something? I'd rather do a SaaS too but I have ruled it out as a lost cause for now. So if you have found something let me know.