Show HN: Optic – Alerts on Business Metrics from Rails Apps
1. Notify a channel when a new customer signs up.
2. Notify a channel when any customer has more than 5 items in their shopping cart.
3. Notify me via Slack DM when a particular high-value customer activates their account.
We’ve been building Rails applications for a decade now, and we’ve long wanted a zero-configuration system for alerting on business metrics, just like New Relic understands your application performance in terms of Rails MVC. Popular analytics tools failed us in two ways: they force you to duplicate your application logic in their tool and they don’t have a simple way to generate alerts when metrics change.
Optic connects to your database through the ORM and uses ActiveRecord to give you smarter metrics and alerts without writing queries. And because Optic lives in your application, as your data model evolves you don’t have to rewrite your analytics queries to keep up.
Right now Optic supports Rails 5+, and is tested with PostgreSQL and MySQL. We use it for monitoring several production Rails applications (including itself), and we’ve tested it with open-source Rails applications like Rubygems.org, Discourse, and Lobste.rs. Optic uses read-only database transactions and tight limits on transaction times to minimize risk to your application. Still, we recommend testing thoroughly in your staging environment before deploying to production.
This preview release is free for individual use, with an unlimited number of projects, metrics, and rules, and retention of up to 12 hours of data. Hit the green button in the application to contact us if you’re interested in a multi-user tenant or longer data retention periods. We’re looking forward to your feedback - and if you’re not a Rails user, what framework would you like to see Optic support next?