411 – An Alert Management Web Application | Hacker News Reader

411 – An Alert Management Web Application

fouroneone.io

86 pointsApsOps30 comments

I'm consistently surprised with Etsy engineering. (I guess that means I am not updating.) For what appears to my eye to be a rather generic "e-commerce marketplace" (my only visibility is regretsy) they really do a lot of big engineering projects.

I would have expected that a public company in this position would scale back engineering since it doesn't, at first glance, seem to be directly relevant to their business (they're not a tech company). How does a company end up with "good" management that keeps the tech so strong?

I would guess it has something to do with tough lessons learned from their catastrophic early technical debt that brought the site and development to somewhat of a standstill right around 2009 or so.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eenrfm50mXw

Many of the acknowledged leaders from a tech architecture standpoint started from the point of their architecture being a real mess. Soundcloud and Spotify come to mind.

A "generic e-commerce marketplace" like, say, Amazon?

> (they're not a tech company)

Is that a nod to Anil Dash's post[1] arguing that there is no tech industry as such?

[1]: https://medium.com/humane-tech/there-is-no-technology-indust...

I love when the guys from Etsy present at conferences and they start with that joke:

We are a monitoring company with a side line in being an online marketplace

Well the app is breaking the return button.

example here : https://demo.fouroneone.io/alerts

Seriously ...

I thought you meant hitting "return" on the keyboard, but then I spent 30 seconds trying to go back to HN with a keyboard shortcut and discovered what you meant.

Ugh, this is a cardinal sin. Gross.

Furiously trying to go back to the last page makes me frustrated. Pretty sure that this is very high up on my personal Web app sins list

This looks pretty cool and very slick, though it seems very similar to what Graylog[1] offers out of the box, which we've been using in production for some time now.

http://docs.graylog.org/en/2.1/pages/getting_started/stream_...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this allow for a much richer set of alerts since you're able to use the elastic search query syntax? This also allows you to alert on an empty result set which can be pretty handy.

Just got this set up internally and it seems pretty slick, but my chief complaint is the heavy focus on Logstash (which we don't use), instead of Elasticsearch (which is really what's meant). Also, it seems to be missing support for wildcard indices or hourly (non-daily) indices in Elasticsearch.

It looks like Etsy's security team built this to replace functionality they depended on in Splunk that was missing in Elasticsearch. The slides don't make clear why they moved away from Splunk.

Cost?

Has to be cost. With how much they charge I'm still surprised that there's no startups offering comparable (particularly on-prem) products. May be it's a harder product to make than it seems.

> I'm still surprised that there's no startups offering comparable (particularly on-prem) products

Please consider giving EventQL [0] a try some time! It's completely open-source and self-hostable. Still a new project though, just released this summer and still in beta.

[0] https://eventql.io/

"EventQL is a distributed, analytical database. It allows you to store massive amounts of structured data and explore it using SQL and other programmatic query facilities."

So it's a completely different class of application than splunk or elasticsearch, and one that you have a commercial interest in. Please don't spam HN.

>> So it's a completely different class of application than splunk or elasticsearch

Sure it takes a somewhat different approach (i.e. it requires an explicit schema), but for the use case discussed in this thread it _is_ completely relevant and a comparable open-source/on-premise alternative which parent was asking about.

>> one that you have a commercial interest in

Yes, I'm involved in the EventQL project but I thought that it was obvious from the way I phrased my posting. Usually I always include a disclaimer to prevent misunderstandings but I didn't consider it necessary in this case.

>> Please don't spam HN.

I don't think pitching a (relevant) startup is against the rules or the spirit of a startup forum (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> Configure Searches to periodically run against a variety of data sources. You can define a custom pipeline of Filters to manipulate any generated Alerts and forward them to multiple Targets.

When I read this I thought it was some sort of scraping service or something, a bit like IFTTT where you can hook things together

Same here. Looking a bit deeper it seems the searches are only run against elasticsearch? Also, whats up with the dependencies... php and node? why?

Could someone provide an example use case?

I had to read through 2.5 pages of documentation to find one.

https://github.com/etsy/411/blob/master/docs/GettingStarted....

Looks like this wasn't ready to be released? The domain also just points to the github repo.

Seriously. Can someone please downvote this whole post? Is this the caliber of content we now have on the front page of HN?

The slides in this linked deck made it very clear: https://speakerdeck.com/kennysan/411-a-framework-for-managin...

TL;DR - it's for alerting on ELK, claimed to come with a better query language than both SPL and Elastic QueryDSL (for the use case at least), and a decent admin UI for managing the queries.

It would be interesting to compare with Yelp's ElastAlert project. That one is Python (for all the PHP haters) but it doesn't have a fancy UI.

Why not zabbix?

That's a redundant question. Zabbix is why not zabbix.

Am I understanding this correctly to be essentially fail2ban without the banning part but with a history and a Sentry-style interface?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com