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Show HN: Real-time application performance monitoring

dashboard.graphdat.com

68 pointsgarrydanger31 comments

Congratulations to the team for a beautiful product and a very beautiful site! I look forward to see more support of other platforms and frameworks (I use Django/Python).

I have to think about it a bit more deeply to make a thoughtful comment regarding the product. However, I did catch a few little things that you can fix:

1) http://www.graphdat.com/pricing, "Don’t need history, than it's all free." should be "Don’t need history, then it's all free."

2) I appreciate your tag line: "Remember all servers get all features, always." but I think punctuation would really make it sticks: "Remember: all servers get all features--always!" I'm not sure, but I love it it and I want this to be even more impactful.

3) https://dashboard.graphdat.com/landing page, other than signup/login perhaps a "learn more" button/link? I am a paranoid guy, especially when it comes to installing stuff on my server, so I would want to learn more about the product before even hitting the signup button.

As a developer, I love the product and your presentation. http://www.graphdat.com/images/img1.png should be replaced with new screenshots from the current look. What graphing tool are you using? Definitely love to learn more about you guys. Perhaps a developer's blog?

Again, congratulations on a great job well done so far and looking forward to seeing and learning more about you guys.

-V.

Thanks very much, we're busy adding support for more languages right now and Python / Django is at the top of the list.

Very slick landing page. I've not seen that done before (am I clueless?) but I love the text overlay -- much better than a "click here to watch a video intro!" The point is: I watched, and I was engaged.

I'm on an iPad so I'm not sure of the whole experience but one thing that came to mind, especially given the "faded" UI is that clicking outside the presentation should allow the user to shortcut to the end and jump right in, maybe with a message along the lines of "ok, jump right in...to continue to intro, just click here"

Can you share a bit about how the text overlay/intro was made? Might be a cool project in and of itself...

Nothing too fancy with the overlay, just some good old fashioned javascript + css. Seems like lots of people are interested so we'll whip up a blog post for everyone.

Please - the landing page does a great job.

The real time graphs look great.....D3 + cube/node?

If they're cube related, definitely the best i've seen for it.

The intro text is nice, but is there some way to stop it? I just wanted to click around in the interface and then read about it afterwards.

As with most comments, I'd say very slick and straight to the point demo. The typing text did kinda annoyed me abit - it's probably a give or take as I don't have patience reading things - would prefer to let me jump in and play around with it.

Just curious, did you have to write all the graphing yourselves or did you use a library?

Yeah, we ended up writing the graphing library ourselves. Due to the nature of the data and frequencies of redrawing the large open source libraries were too CPU intensive.

Looks really awesome, nice work, the little walk through was great as well. A few comments:

1) On the walkthrough my browser wasn't quite wide enough so the text was scrolling off the window. Maybe scale the font size down a bit based on window size if you don't want to deal with wrapping?

2) My first thought before giving it a go and having some reassurance on how this will impact the network/cpu on my server. I know the answer is "it will be negligible", but having it called out specifically reassures me it has been thought of. Same goes with security. As a matter of fact having the agent be open source seems like it would go a long ways there. (doesn't seem like those are the crown jewels but perhaps they are)

Anyways, congrats on the launch, super cool. Next time I have a bit of time I'll definitely try installing it on one of our servers and checking it out.

This is awesome. Coincidentally, I was looking at various monitoring options and strayed onto HN and found this. I'll be signing up to give this a try.

BTW, your SSL seems to be off. I tried to reach https://graphdat.com and Chrome showed me an error saying your certificate was configured for *.graphdat.com and not for graphdat.com.

EDIT: Played with it for sometime and here's another thought. In the How it works page, each step should link to a page showing how to perform it. Same for the various server and OS logos. I clicked the nginx logo expecting to get directions to install the nginx plugin and instead it sent me to nginx homepage.

That's a really slick UI. Your presentation of data is really good. there are lots of features you could add to this to make it even more useful, but I really like the ability you give now.

Is your retention period limited to three months or is that just the amount of data you have on hand ?

Also configuration seems to be a bit lacking, is there a way I can change the graphs I have on the screen or select different metrics ( for example I want things like Swap or CPU Wait time ) , and I don't see a way to ad din my own devices. Are those just limits of me only looking at the demo or is that work pending ?

Either way great job looks really slick.

We're going to stick with 3 months for now, our idea being that we want to keep costs low so the product is pretty affordable to everyone.

We're still debating how the UX for configuration will look, as soon as we figure it out then we can start work on that :)

That is a wonderful introduction. Any tips on making site introductions like that?

Agreed, would be nice to get some pointers :)

Just an FYI, the link to the windows installer on the modal that launches immediately after you sign-up is dead (http://www.graphdat.com/agent/GraphdatAgent.exe)

Note, I'm only half done with my coffee so...you never know.

Update: I just came back to the site and launched the model seems like the link is now http://windows.graphdat.com/agent/GraphdatAgent.exe which works...

we may or may not have forgotten to rsync that binary to a new web server we started up.

you might want to consider using git as your deployment model.

Over the past year I switched to using git to deploy almost all of my apps & services and it is just so much better than what I was doing before (various cobbled together crap).

I even have git repos for things like my servers' .bashrc file ... you'd be surprised how useful that is.

Yes there are tools like puppet & chef and whatnot, but I think of those as better suited to dependencies than your actual code with its higher push frequency.

[UPDATE] might as well talk about how we do this:

In order to use "git push" from a development box to push to remote servers (rather than having them pull from a repo, which requires keeping a git repo accessible from your production boxes, which might not be convenient), you need two things:

1. On the server, run this:

  git config receive.denyCurrentBranch ignore

Otherwise git will refuse your pushes b/c the receiving end is already on that branch

2. On the server, write a .git/hooks/post-receive and make it executable. Its contents should be:

  #!/bin/sh
  # NB: hooks execute in the .git dir (not the repo root)
  # and GIT_DIR is set to '.'; either one prevents "git checkout" from working
  unset GIT_DIR
  cd ..
  git checkout -f # force checkout the current branch

See http://serverfault.com/questions/107608/git-post-receive-hoo... if you are curious about the GIT_DIR business.

Looks awesome, I'll probably install and play around with it for my personal project.

That said, I'm not sure your pricing is aligned correctly. Check out Patio11's excellent article on SaaS pricing (with a company that is in a similar space): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/

I got:

  Graphdat is a very intense graphing experience and to pull it off,
  we need a browser that meets some minimum requirements.

  To use Graphdat, you need to upgrade your browser

I'm running Firefox nightly. (User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:20.0) Gecko/20.0 Firefox/20.0)

We've just patched that up so the firefox nightly will now work. Sorry about that!

Good work ! But how many people would be comfortable installing an agent on a machine or a plugin on web server. Performance and security concerns. It also causes network traffic to send data from server to your cloud. How is it better than Newrelic.

Sure, not everyone will want to install our agent and people using services like Heroku or AppHarbour wont be able to so we're working on a solution for that right now. Having an agent was the best way for us to launch and show off the features we are trying to push like real-time updates and historical zooming.

Its hard. One possible thing could be to share the source code of the agent with the customers. Before installing they can view the source of the agent.

Love it...I found the intro annoying and obstructive though. For something like that I'd want to just jump directly to a usable demo, maybe with some tooltips or other explanation.

This looks nice. Are you supporting APM for Java containers (Tomcat / Jetty / JBoss) as well? JavaAgent approach could help get a lot of detailed analysis for JVM apps.

Having a Java SDK is on our roadmap, once it's out we will let you know.

hey, this is nice! but my impression is it looks "heavy". maybe it's the combination of thick lines/shadows, dark colors and a bit slow responsiveness. on the upside, the "heaviness" makes it look "more serious".

Looks great! Any chance this service will support Fedora relatively soon?

Looks awesome! Do you support notifications (email, SMS, etc) ?

Not yet, but it is very high on our list of priorities. Once we have it implemented we'll let you know.

you guys should just provide RPMs for nginx/apache etc. vs having me manually compile then with the required submodule

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