Show HN: Errorpush – Minimalist Sentry alternative using PostgreSQL | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Errorpush – Minimalist Sentry alternative using PostgreSQL

github.com

124 pointshauxir18 comments

Hey! Cory, (Co-Founder/CTO) from Rollbar here.

Just wanted to say I think this is awesome and I love what you're doing here! :D

And to the author, I'd love to chat - drop me a line at cory@rollbar.com

I really wanted (needed?) Sentry at my last place but couldn't get approval for it.

Unfortunately we did already log all errors it was the (minimal, but existent) intelligence that Sentry did _after_ collecting logs that I needed. I wanted the histogram of errors and to get alerted when errors passed a threshold but also get alerted on any new error that hadn't been seen before.

Some of this can get hacked up with Grafana but you're really stretching it.

I've only used the SaaS version, but Sentry can be self hosted for free, can't it? Has anyone done this and is it feasable?

I self-host Sentry, so it's feasible, but:

• It's huge. If I run `docker-compose ps`, it lists thirty entries, one of which seems to have failed and exited.

• With that hugeness comes CPU and RAM requirements. Sentry's installer complains if you give it anything under 8 GB of memory and 4 cores.

• The UI comes with an obnoxious amount of JavaScript, and is just generally slow and clunky. I see spinning wheels a lot.

Errorpush looks like a fantastic alternative for my needs, especially if I'm able to use the Rollbar Terraform provider to configure it, as well as if there are suitable integrations for all the programming languages my services are written in.

It is huge but with the pricing, spinning up a dedicated instance for Sentry is cheaper than saas version (if you already have an engineer to handle it)

What I don't like is it seems to randomly use certain amount of CPU despite very low volume of error reporting. No idea what it's doing.

It seems the one container is supposed to quit on launch?

I don't exactly feel the UI too slow and since it has features one would expect including user management against several auth providers, I can't find a decent alternative.

Their is also GlitchTip, which is an Open Source fork of Sentry, created after Sentry went proprietary in order to keep the Open Source legacy maintained. https://glitchtip.com/

I manage a self-hosted version at work for the development environment but we use the paid, cloud version for production environments.

Managing the self-hosted version is farily trivial (the catch is that, anyway, we don't provide SLAs or HA for the dev environment.

My main advice would be to:

1. use ZFS, keep the docker-compose files along with the data volumes on a dedicated dataset

2. take a snapshot before every update, delete the snapshot when users confirm everything is working okay

3. for the love of god make sure you perform every minor version.

I did have to do a 9.1.2 -> 21.5.x upgrade and it's been quite a PITA. In Sentry's defense, it was quite a jump. And in Sentry's honor, I was able to retain projects, users and most useful things (except events, but for the development environment who cares?).

Upgrading to, say 21.5 to 21.6 was quite a breeze instead.

It can be done, but it had weird moments of stuff breaking and being difficult to debug due to complexity, with only some dead forum threads as "help".

A previous employer did this, I think. It worked well from my perspective as a user but I don't know how difficult it was to manage.

We currently self host a version from ~2019, I haven't looked into upgrading the version but just the old version is working great.

> Compatible with any Rollbar client(see https://docs.rollbar.com/docs). Just change the endpoint URL to your errorpush URL.

Great idea! Bookmarked.

I really don't think it's a great idea to be "compatible" with a commercial product that has no link with the project: it can change at any time and break things.

I see where you're coming from but the rollbar clients are all open source so in case things break, people can just stick with a version that works.

This is cool - I've built a simple version of this sorta system before Rollbar et al existed and just stored the aggregated events in memory. I'd just keep the most recent occurrence only - not every event - and the times the exception occurred so I could see how often it was happening over the last N seconds (hours, days, etc).

To be clear, this is not compatible with the Sentry protocol or SDK, but the Rollbar ones, right?

correct

A Kafka topic with a ksql query on top could be very interesting and offer some real time capabilities

I don't know if "Kafka with x" can ever count as "minimalist" though.

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