Is the value mostly on the visualization and dashboard portion? Is it some sort of WYSIWYG query editor?
Now if they are providing the tools to make analysis quick, efficient, and intelligent - That makes a bit more sense. Guess I'll have to check out a trial.
The main alternative to Keen IO is to build your own backend. Some developers will always prefer that, but many folks don't have the time & resources to devote to constructing & maintaining an analytics backend. Here are some things that people appreciate about Keen IO:
- The ability to start collecting & querying their event data immediately & easily
- Keen's uptime and reliability (transferring backend ops from their pager to ours).
- Not having to worry about scalability. For customers who are collecting billions of events per month and planning to double in less than a year, data challenges are less trivial.
- A point and click query interface that can be used by some non-devs to run analysis, create graphs, extract data, etc
- Query & visualization libraries that allow you to create reporting interfaces (websites/dashboards/customer-facing-analytics) much more quickly
- A growing inventory of features & open source tools that build on the API (scoped keys, caching, notifications, dashboard templates, etc)
Keen IO takes an API-based approach to the problem, which means:
- developer abstractions are higher level than rolling your own
- scalability is as easy as "my bill went up" (as opposed to "my ALTER statements stopped working!" or "I need to leave mongo and buy a book on distributed system engineering!"
- ability to cover new/emergent use cases is a lot higher than you would get with an off-the-shelf analytics product