[HN Gopher] Show HN: DevRaven - Monitoring for Developers
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       Show HN: DevRaven - Monitoring for Developers
        
       Hi HN! I am Krishna Thota, founder of DevRaven. DevRaven is a
       monitoring platform for Developers.  DevRaven enables engineering
       teams or individual developers to setup active monitoring for their
       services/applications and get alerted when things don't work as
       expected  Today's launch makes available the following features:
       API Monitoring - Monitor your HTTP end points and perform no-code
       or scripted assertions.  Synthetic Monitoring - Execute browser
       based end-to-end tests using Playwright framework. No setup
       required.  SSL Monitoring - Monitor SSL certificates for your end
       points and get alerted before they expire.  Web Page Monitoring -
       Run continuous Lighthouse audits on your web pages to ensure best
       performance, SEO.  Welcome any feedback, questions or suggestions.
        
       Author : kc10
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2022-07-31 16:46 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.devraven.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.devraven.io)
        
       | a-dub wrote:
       | this looks nice. generous free tier! seconding the idea that it
       | would be nice if gitops (flat config files in git) was a first
       | class interface to configure everything. that would be a
       | differentiator for me.
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Thanks.
         | 
         | Completely agree with your feedback on git being the config
         | source for scripts.
        
           | a-dub wrote:
           | i'd consider going a step further and making the web ui
           | completely optional for configuration after the billing is
           | set up. i know that sounds extreme, but personally that is
           | something i would really, really like. maybe a small cli tool
           | that gives me a template config file that i can then edit and
           | and then run again manually or via ci to apply my changes.
           | 
           | that may be extreme and reflective of my personal
           | preferences, so grains of salt are warranted. :)
        
             | kc10 wrote:
             | :-) I will definitely spike it asap and make it as simple
             | as possible to setup and run via a git repo.
        
       | Sytten wrote:
       | What differentiate you from the number of existing monitoring
       | platforms? Genuinely curious as it is a crowded space with a lot
       | of established players.
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Definitely the space is crowded. But there are wide spectrum of
         | maturity of engineering teams and how much they monitor.
         | 
         | I think the features we have today are the baseline for any
         | monitoring solution. But the idea is to expand and build a
         | single platform to monitor anything that developers would like
         | to monitor.
        
           | ushakov wrote:
           | > a single platform to monitor anything that developers would
           | like to monitor
           | 
           |  _a jack of all trades, master of none_
        
             | kc10 wrote:
             | IMO, nothing wrong with offering core functionality for
             | various types of monitors that works for majority cases.
        
               | ushakov wrote:
               | please think for a moment what you've just said
               | 
               | you said you could offer me a tool that does many
               | different things, but nothing specific
               | 
               | but, as a potential customer i would be looking for a
               | tool that could solve _my specific problem_
               | 
               | now think about that...
        
       | leonardinius wrote:
       | Hi Krishna, Great product you have put there.
       | 
       | What is the long term plan wrt pricing, what should I expect if I
       | sign up?
       | 
       | Like the clarity of the home page, well done and good luck!
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Thanks!
         | 
         | The free SKU allow you to start setting up and try out
         | monitoring. You can change to paid SKU when you are ready to
         | run more than 10000 API checks/month or 2500 synthetic
         | checks/months.
         | 
         | We do not have per seat pricing. It's purely usage based and
         | you can purchase additional checks as you go.
        
       | paulgb wrote:
       | This is very timely for something I've been wanting to do! Giving
       | it a try now.
       | 
       | Edit: tried it. I like it, I hadn't used playwright before but it
       | was fairly straightforward to set up the test I wanted. Since you
       | requested feedback, some thoughts:
       | 
       | - I started by writing and testing my check locally, and then
       | copied it over into a "synthetic test". It would be cool if that
       | were more seamless, e.g. if all of my tests were configured
       | through a git repo and DevRaven had a GitHub webhook that was
       | notified when the config changed.
       | 
       | - I had to double-escape some backslashes in my code for it to be
       | accepted, you might be eating the escapes during some string
       | processing?
       | 
       | - It would be cool to see timings of tests (i.e. the time between
       | individual asserts as reported by playwright, but even the
       | overall time would be a useful metric).
       | 
       | - This is probably just my inexperience with playwright, but it
       | would be nice to have an example that used playwright's expect
       | function instead of chai.
       | 
       | - TypeScript support would also be nice.
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Thanks Paul for the feedback.
         | 
         | - ya, great idea to be able to pull the changes via git.
         | 
         | - I will look into the issue. edit: confirmed a bug.
         | 
         | - The overall time is captured and is shown in the logs. The
         | dashboard view will be available very soon showing the
         | execution time.
         | 
         | - I will add an example to the recipes for expect as well.
         | 
         | - Agreed on TypeScript support. I will check the feasibility to
         | support on current stack.
        
           | kc10 wrote:
           | update: double-escape issue is now fixed.
        
             | paulgb wrote:
             | That was fast! Cheers.
        
       | leetrout wrote:
       | Nice work!
       | 
       | Any plans to support cron monitoring / time of day monitoring?
       | Something akin to cronitor?
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Thanks!
         | 
         | The idea is to expand the feature set depending on user
         | feedback. Cron monitor is on my radar.
         | 
         | Is there something you don't like in Cronitor?
        
       | ushakov wrote:
       | why would i use your proprietary product when there are (lots!)
       | of open-source alternatives available?
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Whether to use a SaaS service or build something in-house is a
         | choice for your engineering organization.
         | 
         | But in most cases, people just want to use something that works
         | so they can spend on their time and resources on building their
         | own apps/services.
        
         | hunterb123 wrote:
         | time
        
       | CSMastermind wrote:
       | Hi Krishna, congrats on the launch!
       | 
       | I really like that you have the 'try with no credit card'
       | offering, I wish more companies would do this.
       | 
       | One question I'd have for you is how _your_ services are hosted.
       | If my service is hosted on AWS us-east-1 and so is my monitoring
       | I'll be worried that I'm not going to get alerted when AWS itself
       | has problems.
       | 
       | It seems to me that you're entering into a crowded market. I can
       | think of a dozen or more companies with similar offering. How do
       | you plan on differentiating yourself? Who is the target user for
       | your product and why would they select it instead of a
       | competitor?
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Thanks!
         | 
         | Our service is hosted in GCP today. Yes, it's totally possible
         | that alerts may not be sent out or delayed if the regions where
         | we hosted our services are down. I will definitely look into
         | how we can mitigate such issues.
         | 
         | It is a crowded space. But the market opportunity is also huge.
         | I think pretty much any business is a software business. Our
         | main idea is to expand the suite to various other areas of
         | monitoring and be the single platform for monitoring anything.
        
       | jibnair wrote:
       | Love the simplicity !
        
       | bdcravens wrote:
       | How many is on the DevRaven team?
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | I am a solo founder, but will be onboarding a co-founder very
         | soon.
        
       | hunterb123 wrote:
       | This is an area that needs to be fleshed out, so far the best
       | solution I've found is https://checklyhq.com/
       | 
       | Playwright + other monitoring checks as a service is amazing.
       | 
       | You do have to make your tests pretty resilient to prevent false
       | positives through (retry on network issues etc.)
       | 
       | The Playwright test framework helps with that.
        
         | kc10 wrote:
         | Playwright is amazing. Tests are reliable compared to other
         | frameworks and work on all browsers. That's the reason we use
         | Playwright for running our Synthetic tests.
         | 
         | Checkly is in the market for the last 5+ years and they are
         | definitely feature rich compared to DevRaven. But functionally
         | pretty similar.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-31 23:01 UTC)