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Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#152
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on datadog. It's crazy how easy it was to setup and cover all our infra (AWS, ELB, postgresql, cassandra, kafka, haproxy, nginx, etc...). The tool paid for itself with the infra optimizations we could find in the first month of usage. It makes me sad when I'm forced to work with graphite/prometheus/grafana in my newer company. These can't gather half the metrics and their charting capabilities are so bad in compar…

Can you expand? As someone who maintains a large-ish prometheus/grafana installation on prems I don't know what we're missing! We have a couple of custom metrics that we developed in prometheus and the OSS plugins/dashboards look great.

From my perspective at a smaller startup (so YMMV) after switching to Datadog; the first thing I noticed was how _fast_ Datadog was. The queries and graphing capabilities were also really powerful. Or maybe I just didn't know how to use the old tools, but regardless it was super easy to pick up and do things I struggled with in Prometheus/Grafana.

It was also mind-blowing how things were integrated. For example. See a slow request? Click into the APM trace. Notice a service on that trace being slow? Click onto it, see what host it was running on. From there, another button pulls up all the Docker containers running on the host in that point in time. The CPU usage is visualized - and, aha! We forgot to set a CPU limit on one of those other jobs.

Debugging issues like that would've been nearly impossible otherwise, and we had more than a few cases of that.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#154
post #94
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Splunk among the bests for you? What is the cheaper alternative?

For an on-prem general purpose logging server, it's fast and easy to maintain. The query engine supports fairly complex queries. Did I mention it's fast? Plus it's an industry standard so it's an easier sell in the enterprise. It's also actually not that expensive at low data volumes -- prices are comparable to Sumologic. Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a database. Some fol…

At what scale is your on premise Splunk? As a member of a team maintaining very large on-prem Splunk service I haven't found maintaining Splunk to be an easy undertaking.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#155
LanSweeper. It's the primary asset tracker/scanner we use for our local network of over 3000 network devices. It can read switch data to even provide a means of finding what port a device is connected to on a switch. Combine with ArcGIS to physically trace thousands of network cables and hundreds of fiber trunks and runs, we're able to have immediate access/knowledge of where any asset is located virtually and physically as well as the entire physical path between each point. These two tools have allowed us to migrate from knowledge only being saved in the memory of a few individuals to being preserved via documentation.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#156
post #103

Cisco's Duo Security MFA product. It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working. It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.

Huh I have used Duo for years and had no idea they were owned by Cisco. Agree with you though - I don't spend more than a few seconds a day interacting with it, but it gets the job done painlessly.

Acquired by Cisco

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#157
post #133

* Looker (most usable BI tool I’ve come across so far) * DataDog (distributed tracing is a dream) * IntelliJ (idea, goland, pycharm, clion, datagrip) * MindNode (macOS-only mind-mapping software) Recently started using smart sheets, but on the fence about this one so far.

What other BI platforms have you used? We're looking to build out our BI infrastructure as a service for our customers and are currently testing google data studio but have looked into Sisense + Looker.

QuickSight, Tableau, Chartio. Disappointed with all of these

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#158
post #83
post #72

Things that we pay for. SQL Server : it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features. Tableau : more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau l…

Why is Splunk among the bests for you? What is the cheaper alternative?

LogzIO is a hosted ELK stack and does a proper job for us.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#159

Jetbrains IntelliJ. I use it for html, JS, CSS, Vue, node.js, Python, Java, SQL, etc. I’ve tried visual studio and some other IDEs, but find intellij to be superior in every way.

Wow.. I hate it... the quality of IntelliJ has really fallen. I've been using it for like 5 years now and I'm constantly fighting it There are literally 20-40 serious bugs that impact me daily.

I find this with all IDEs; quality is dropping fast and bugs do not get fixed. I find myself reaching for emacs more and more.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best enterprise software you use every day?

#160
post #94
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Splunk among the bests for you? What is the cheaper alternative?

For an on-prem general purpose logging server, it's fast and easy to maintain. The query engine supports fairly complex queries. Did I mention it's fast? Plus it's an industry standard so it's an easier sell in the enterprise. It's also actually not that expensive at low data volumes -- prices are comparable to Sumologic. Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a database. Some fol…

I feel Splunk is maybe quirky

It has lots of query processing operations, sure. But it can't do (at least not easily) some things you could do with bash/grep in "traditional" settings (example, get the context between lines that match a pattern)

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