Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps
leansentry.com
leansentry.com
1. I gather from reading the How-it-works pages that the monitoring service is not invasive. How about the optional agent, how invasive is that and does it carry extra performance impact? I cant see anywhere explained what it does, and how much of the functionality that depends on it
2. On your demo site, in one of the alerts you slow causes of slow queries. It says "SQL query "dbo.spSlowNumbers" caused slow responses on "/Profile/Save". How does your service know the name of the stored proc? Does it hook into SQL server calls or?
3. Is it safe to install on a production webserver? Was thinking we would try it out on one of our 5 webservers.
4. Is it easy to remove the monitoring service+agent again if we dont like it?
Thanks
1. You are absolutely right, the agent is an optional component. Without the agent, you get most of LeanSentry's monitoring features without having to install ANYTHING on your production servers.
2. We know the name of the stored procedure/SQL query from monitoring ADO.NET activity externally via ETW, the high speed event tracing in windows. We do not actually connect to your SQL server for this.
3. We worked hard to make sure LeanSentry is safe for production environments (thats what its for). We also designed it so it can be completely sandboxed in production. Most importantly, it will never load anything into your application directly, unlike debuggers or profilers, and has no chance of crashing your application.
The agent adds some deeper diagnostic capabilities, including SQL query/IIS module/REST call monitoring, CPU profiling, etc. It does have a bit more overhead since you have to install it on the actual production server, but we worked hard to make sure it keeps a low footprint (and even shuts itself down if something goes wrong causing higher utilization).
4. You can remove the monitoring service and the agent anytime. We provide the configuration script for servers as a batch file so its easy to see the changes we make.
These are great questions - if you have more, hit us up on chat on our website!
Best, Mike
1. We're probably not going to use it unless we can host it ourselves because we can't possibly risk information leaking out of the infrastructure and being thrown god knows where.
2. If all it does is IIS/ASP.Net applications, the utility is limited. Everything is about holistic tools which can aggregate everything in one place from all systems. In our situation, we monitor piles of SQL Servers, nearly 100 IIS servers, MSMQ, NServiceBus, Routers, Switches, Disk array IO throughput. One tool to rule them all there.
3. I doubt you could actually handle the load of a mid-large site where this would be valuable. What are your guarantees on that front?
Not wishing to trash your efforts, but that's how us architects see it and we're the guys with the credit cards :)
2. There seems to be some SQL stuff in there - IO would be a nice addition though.
3. This could be a problem. Let us host the app our self, and we might be able to handle it?
With that in mind, i would love to have this as a part of my daily toolset.
I hear your sentiment re: hosting LeanSentry yourself. We actually started this way, but over time realized that in order to support our data processing and analysis needs, we needed to host this in our own data center. The majority of our customers didnt think twice - they just install it and done.
This model has been proven by New Relic as well - just look at their growth numbers over the last few years.
Certainly there will be people that are more concerned about security, and we get a fair share of them talking to us. The best we can say is, we've done everything we can to make LeanSentry safe (see my earlier comment) while still preserving the value we provide.
Best, Mike
You are right, most APM tools are working on covering multiple platforms. We are trying to provide extra depth into the Windows Server platform because thats what we know (for example, I used to be the PM for IIS 7 / ASP.NET).
Our goal is to be able to help you with more than just giving you the info to monitor your apps, but really give you the expert analysis of it. A better example is, you might hire a consultant to help you tune up your app, or have your developers get training on performance tuning. Those developers will then potentially use New Relic or Redgate tools to support them in doing their work.
In our world, you just use our product and receive that level of expertise automatically from our service. Without having to hire those consultants or have your engineers spend their time learning about the insides of IIS.
Re: leaking information. If you are not comfortable with leaking information, you are not using the new SAAS APM tools like us or New Relic. Thats certainly your tradeoff to make. I have to say though, we worked really hard to make sure we dont collect sensitive data:
- We dont load a profiler/debugger into your application like most other APMs (e.g. New Relic). We collect only external information, which does include errors/stack traces but no data/code/cookies/etc.
- We provide a mode where our monitoring service is sandboxed to a non-production vm in your environment, so nothing to install on prod servers.
Re: scale. We've handled Viddy.com, Vevo.com, etc. Are you larger? We do a lot of engineering to reduce the data volume and process it effectively while maintaining high resolution. Tell us what your specs are and we can tell you if we can do it.
Best, Mike
It would be great if there was a simple calculator on the pricing page, to give a really quick and rough estimate for how much we'd be paying, especially considering the volume discounts and prepay. E.g. 30 large Azure instances for one year. By my calculations that would work out to ~$2300/mo when prepaying for a year (ouch!).
We are making the pricing page more accessible, should be live later tonight.
Re: the pricing for 30 servers.
1. If you use our Core plan, which gives you all our features except the automatic troubleshooters and expert insights, you will pay about $610/month on an annual plan.
2. If you use the Advanced plan, that means you are finding enough value in us automatically resolving your problems and giving you proactive guidance. On that plan, you are paying 2295/month on an annual plan.
I know this might sounds like a lot, but its actually reasonably lower than some of our cheaper APM competitors. The bottom line though is, if you are professionally running a web application, this is chump change compared to the time this saves you:
- If you are a 1 person shop with 5 servers lets say, you may be paying ~150/month. If we just saved you 3 hours this month, you paid for it already.
- If you are a company with 30 servers, you probably have a lot more at stake in making sure your servers run well. But also, you probably employ several full time developers and ops people who manage your servers. You get my point I am sure.
This all depends on whether we are able to truly generate huge time savings in your work day by eliminating the time consuming investigations and troubleshooting. And thats exactly what we are shooting for!
We also have a promotion right now with a 20% off rate, free upgrade to our Advanced plan for 2 months, and great prepay and volume discounts. More pricing information here: https://www.leansentry.com/Pricing.
Best, Mike
LeanSentry is somewhat similar to New Relic in that we provide server and application performance monitoring.
However, we are 100% focused on the Windows Server/IIS/ASP.NET stack (that's our background), and as a result provide deeper analysis and diagnostics for those applications.
Best, Mike