Hacker News Reader

Comment by oomkiller | Hacker News Reader

Scout is actually pretty good, not sure if you saw it or not.

I hadn't seen Scout, yet. That's good to see a similar service. Having not seen them until now, I can say that we had planned to provide slightly more for less than they do, in terms of data logging and analytics. It's neat to see them, because the things we have come up with are closely in line to them except that I think we genuinely can compete.

I looked into purchasing this exact kind of service a few months ago. I admit that it was tough to find them--they are often not on the front page of google--but there were 3 or 4 players in addition to varying installable tools (sorry, names now forgotten). None really seemed to be what I want, and they were not particularly cheap. I didn't buy any, which is a customer looking to buy in the space and not finding a solution, so by all means give it a go. But you're missing some homework if you had not yet found Scout, which is front and center in this space. One of them even had a whizbang way to edit and test your little agent plugins in the browser in ruby (was that scout?) You have some mature competition here you should consider.

Thanks for the response. We really started custom building our own tool, in house, to do exactly what we wanted. We manage about 150 physical servers, so we can't benefit from the underlying hypervisor info that some VM platforms provide. We have been writing our own, and subsequently feel like we could offer this at a very affordable price. We hadn't seen Scout, mostly because we just dove right into making our own tool. We're now doing some research and are finding that we're right on track in terms of being in line with functionality that others provide - like Scout. We're not tied to Ruby, though. I don't even know if our Linux servers come with Ruby - never used it. Admittedly, ours is a little less mature, which is not a bad thing since we are so new, but we're going to continue following our gut on this and just make it as useful of a tool as possible.

None of the players are tied to Ruby, but the agents are often written in it (not ideal, as the usual 35MB memory footprint adds up over many servers).

In any event, don't take my call for research as a call not to join the party. The fact that you haven't heard of them means that none of them have quite solved the product/market fit stage and made it to ubiquity. Being intimidated or imitating them would not be the way to go, but knowing about them would probably be useful, and they have some good ideas.

(alternately, it means that most people prefer to do this in-house, and there's just not a market there. But I don't believe that, this is such boring stuff that happens on every project...)

anyways, good night and good luck

Reply on news.ycombinator.com