Comment by trjordan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trjordan | Hacker News Reader

There's always mixed feelings when a competitor goes public.

I work for AppNeta, and while we directly compete against New Relic, I love what they've done for the market. Their competitors were these clunky, on-premise, hard-to-use, didn't support Ruby / Python / PHP / node.js apps, and they've built a beautiful service that's legitimately easy to use. A lot of the data is available from CA or Dynatrace, but it's so much harder to set up and use.

Monitoring so commonly focuses on server metrics, or outside-in uptime, or logs, and I really do think that monitoring transactions end-to-end is an important part of the picture. Day to day, New Relic is absolutely the competition, but in the big picture, there's a lot of big companies using technology that's 15 years old because somebody like New Relic or AppNeta hadn't come along yet.

Glad to see that the market likes them as well. There's awesome stuff happening in Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and if you're not already using something like this, I strongly recommend you look at AppNeta, New Relic, ... and not really anybody else, because the rest haven't really figured it out yet.

and not really anybody else, because the rest haven't really figured it out yet.

I beg to differ there. ;) I work on Skylight (https://www.skylight.io) which is definitely doing some interesting stuff in the APM space.

By focusing on just Rails, we are able to provide features that other services that try to be a jack-of-all-trades frequently miss. For example, we just rolled out a feature that helps you monitor memory usage in production with extremely low overhead[1], which I don't think is something any of our competitors offer.

But yeah, definitely agree that New Relic has been a market leader here. They've validated that people are willing to spend real money on improving performance, something that wasn't obvious just a few years ago.

1: http://blog.skylight.io/announcing-memory-traces/

Conversely by focusing on just rails, you effectively eliminate large swaths of the enterprise market. There's a huge opportunity there for someone who can integrate across platforms and technologies, particularly if you can ship a behind-the-firewall solution.

Another Skylight founder here.

Focusing on Rails lets us build a really awesome end-to-end solution that works out of the box. Building an intuitive, explorable interface means constantly considering the application's context, and I can attest to the fact that every time we do UI, nitty-gritty details about how our customers build their applications can often become the dominant consideration. When I use general-purpose solutions that are designed for "all languages and platforms", I am often very frustrated by the resulting lowest-common-denominator APIs and UIs.

We may eventually build versions of Skylight for other platforms, but if we do, we will apply the same level of care and design for other platforms as we have done for Rails. Among other things, that will mean having team members who have written large applications in those platforms, and letting those team members drive the APIs and design for those platforms.

Sounds like a promising future, and the only sane way to approach that level of integration.

I am super happy user of New Relic, but always interested in alternatives. I had never heard of AppNeta, so I checked it out.

Looks like you guys have some nice stuff, but do you mind if I give a new customer first impression?

Very confusing pricing.

First off, right off the bat. There is no central price page and I had to go hunt for what you charge.

Then when I did find Enterprise pricing for TraceView, it has some contradictory language. It says $119/host/month. Then in the bullets below it says

unlimited users

unlimited applications

unlimited hosts

Huh? Is it per host or is it per month?? That makes no sense to me.

Hey, sorry that you find it confusing!

Part of the problem is that we have a couple different products, and they're not all directly comparable with New Relic. Hence the lack of a central pricing page.

TraceView is our offer that's 1:1, as you found, and it's priced monthly per host. The "unlimited" is meant to be "you can buy as many as you want", vs. the "Startup" plan, where you can have a max of 5 hosts. Does that make more sense? (I'd be more than happy to change it to something that makes more sense!)

Why charge me for having more hosts? I am used to the reverse. Buy more, save more.

IMHO, keep the app and 'hours of retention' limit in. Remove the hosts and user limit (I hate user limits; don't you want more people exposed to your app?!?)

We definitely have discounts if you've got a whole ton of hosts. You'll pay less for the 50th host than for the 1st.

That said, a host collects a certain amount of data, so it's not really tenable for us to sell "site licenses" at a fair price. If you're super-bursty, we're happy to charge for the average, AWS-style, but that model tends to upset the finance folks, so we default to the "you'll clearly pay this" model first.

The link to https://support.appneta.com/cloud/traceview/instrumentation/... on the python support page is broken.

Whoops, will get that fixed!

You probably found the right one, but better link: https://support.appneta.com/cloud/traceview/instrumentation/...

strange, there's no pricing info on the site, why?

We've got a couple different products, and they're priced slightly differently.

http://appneta.com/products/traceview is what you want -- scroll down :)

thanks, got anything for HHVM?

Nothing public right now, but we had a beta started. It would probably look something similar to our current PHP instrumentation ... except it would work on HHVM.

If you want to chat, shoot me an email: TR @ appneta. I'm curious to hear if there's anything different we'd want to look at when working on HHVM.

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