Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps

#11

Post by mvolo » Wed, Feb 06, 2013, 11:33 PM UTC

wingspan wrote: post #10

Looks cool, certainly seems to provide value above and beyond typical monitoring tools. 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!).

Hi there wingspan, founder here.

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

Re: Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps

#12

Post by btb » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 9:44 AM UTC

Interesting product, considering trying it out. A few questions

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

Re: Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps

#13

Post by geraldomagella » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 11:58 AM UTC

Hi there, Just a quick comment, we're using LeanSentry to monitor 50 servers and it's being great! We are a brazilian e-Learning SaaS solution provider and the information that we're getting is helping us polish our application and ensure our customers a great service level. We find new uses for it on a daily basis. Our Product manager, sales, developers CEO, CIO, CFO... everyone uses it as the information is "readable" to everyone, not just tech gurus... As you can set things up in matter of minutes it's definitely worth a try.

Re: Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps

#14

Post by mvolo » Thu, Feb 07, 2013, 3:10 PM UTC

btb wrote: post #12

Interesting product, considering trying it out. A few questions 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 quer…

Hi, founder here.

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