Show HN: Monitor your webapp with minimal setup | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Monitor your webapp with minimal setup

5 pointsbillllll11 comments

Hey HN,

I'm building a service that monitors your webapp and gives you a definitive signal when something is broken, all with minimal setup.

You can check it out at: https://www.catalystmonitor.com/, read the docs at: https://docs.catalystmonitor.com/, or see the dashboard at: https://app.catalystmonitor.com/

You can also see a (very quickly made) demo at: https://www.loom.com/share/5b38a328ded94f93a980f1ba28081329?sid=5afe55d1-0e0a-42a1-b748-1c230eacd430

I've seen how having robust internal monitoring infra maintained by dedicated teams helped developers at large companies. This was something I missed when I later moved to a startup. I was disappointed by how much setup and maintenance was required by existing monitoring products: I constantly fiddled with Splunk queries, pruned Sentry errors, and created New Relic dashbords, all to get weak signals to the only thing I cared about: is my product currently broken or not for users? So I decided to build the tool that I would've wanted.

Most people building a product want to maximize effort on actually building their product and minimize effort monitoring it, so I built this service to be easy to set up: you can sign up, integrate it, and get useful signals within a day without worrying about configuration or monitoring new code-paths.

The downside to being easy to set up is that it's opinionated, less configurable, and won't be 100% effective for certain use-cases. If you throw errors and use HTTP error codes instead of swallowing errors, you'll get useful monitoring with minimal effort right out of the box.

There are currently client libraries for the browser, Node.JS, Express, and React Router, but integration with other JS/TS frameworks shouldn't be hard while integration with other languages is definitely possible. Please let me know if you'd be interested in support for another language or framework.

Also, I know it's ironic, but it's still under development, and thus may have bugs. I'd love to know what you think. Either way, may your queries flow and your pagers stay silent.

Thanks for sharing! It would be cool to share a loom or a sample dashboard to get things going, as I'd love to see a little more before signing up. It's hard for me to tell where this fits in. Is it a replacement for early usage of datadog? Does this offer support like pagerduty for pinging me? Is it the devX of setup?

Congrats on the launch!

Thanks! Let get a demo video going. In the meantime, there are little snippets of the UI on https://www.catalystmonitor.com/.

It's a bit like Datadog in the sense that you do have dashboards but it doesn't monitor blackbox metrics (like CPU %, etc), and focuses on whitebox metrics like error %.

What Datadog and other monitoring products don't do (AFAIK) is give you the ability to drill into your error %. You can breakdown your frontend pages and backend endpoints by path params, status code, log messages, (and soon) user to find commonalities and narrow down your smoking gun. After you find your smoking gun, you can immediately get traces and log messages of what happened from frontend to backend.

For example, if I notice a server endpoint has a high error %, I can check my breakdowns to see if it's specific to a user or endpoint, and if there is any log messages that happened for every error. Once I've narrowed it down, I can quickly find sessions that include the server endpoint with the breakdowns I've selected, and see what happened on the frontend and backend(s). The idea is to provide this value with minimal setup.

Paging is definitely something that I want to implement.

Text is hard so I'll record a video.

You an see a (very quickly made) demo here: https://www.loom.com/share/5b38a328ded94f93a980f1ba28081329?...

The dashboard looks clean in this loom, and I don't think the pictures you have on https://www.catalystmonitor.com/ do the same justice that this loom does. The pics look a little blurry, and it's hard to see how the screenshots fit in. While the loom shows off the entire dashboard and looks great!

Best of luck with everything

Looks nice Bill. Do you have pricing info?

Hey, so right now while it's under development, it's free. Quite frankly, I'm not too familiar with pricing for monitoring tools, so I'd love any suggestions here.

Sorry I'm not much help here, I wouldn't know how to price it either. I'll keep it bookmarked though, in case you offer pricing that is accessible to indie devs. I'm not a big corp, but I'd love to have this kind of monitoring in my toy web projects and wouldn't mind paying for it if it is reasonably priced. Best of luck.

Very cool, is Next support planned? I haven't tried onboarding yours, but I like your focus on easy setup. Datadog has become more difficult to setup over time. Sentry, PostHog, and SigNoz were fast to setup but I could never get metrics from my app to be received by any of them. Maybe I was rate limited or maybe it was a config problem, but never got them to work. How much traffic can it handle and what's the pricing for cloud? Can't find pricing on your site.

How are you different from the 20+ existing monitoring solutions?

* https://sentry.io

* https://newrelic.com

* https://www.honeycomb.io

* https://www.datadoghq.com

* https://opstrace.com (YC S19, acquired by GitLab)

* https://posthog.com (YC W20)

* https://signoz.io (YC W21)

* https://www.highlight.io (YC W23)

* https://amplitude.com

* https://www.solarwinds.com/appoptics

* https://skywalking.apache.org

* https://www.servicenow.com/products/observability.html

* https://cronitor.io/real-user-monitoring

* https://www.appsignal.com

* https://grafana.com/products/cloud

* https://uptrace.dev

* https://github.com/intelsdi-x/snap

* https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve

* https://glaber.io

* https://rakam.io

* https://www.metabase.com

* https://openreplay.com

If you want to monitor custom app metrics and server resource usage, you can also try Monibot. It's not comparable to catalyst, though.

At the risk of being overly critical sour grapes, I really had tools like Monibot in mind when creating Catalyst.

Out of the box, Monibot throws a bunch of data at you like database size, CPU %, requests, etc. None of these metrics really tell you if something in your webapp is broken. And if you want more useful metrics, you gotta instrument them yourself.

It does do some things that Catalyst critically misses (health checks, e-mail notifications). But at the same time, if you're going to prod, Monibot by itself is not something you'd be comfortable with. You're going to need to add other monitoring tools to get that peace of mind.

> Very cool, is Next support planned?

It's definitely in the pipeline!

> How much traffic can it handle and what's the pricing for cloud? Can't find pricing on your site.

So right now, it's still under development, but if you have a small/medium sized project (like 5QPS maybe), it should work. Pricing is free for now while it's under development.

> How are you different from the 20+ existing monitoring solutions?

You've listed a lot of different types of monitoring tools. You have error reporting, session replay, log muxing, metric dashboards, and distributed tracing.

Catalyst combines a few key features from each category, and makes them play well together. For example, you can find a broken endpoint via the error graph and click on the line to get a breakdown of path params, logs, and errors for that specific endpoint. You can filter by these breakdowns to find matching sessions (which is like tracing + session replay). You can basically go from identifying an error, to finding the underlying cause of the error quickly in one dashboard.

In my experience, most tools don't play well together, like if you see a rise in error rates for an endpoint in your dashboard, then you need to make a separate query in your logging tool or your distributed tracing tool if your tools even give you the fidelity to know what to look for. You end up having to compose (and pay for) multiple tools.Even platforms that provide multiple features like DataDog and SigNoz, the features are separate and don't interact.

Philosophically, Catalyst doesn't just want to optimize for setup time, it also wants to optimize for peace of mind time, i.e. you're confident if your webapp is broken, you'll know. Most existing monitoring solutions just dump data at you, and ask you pick out what's important, and a lot of times they don't give you the fidelity you need.

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