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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?

#401

Post by gregjotau »

newspheasant wrote: post #353
kristopolous wrote: post #119

I've tried not to be impressed by airtable, but their on the fly API documentation generators for how you configure things still feels like black magic. Every time I want to be dismissive of the product, it's exceeded what I believed to be an extremely unlikely to meet set of expectations. They've clearly got some pretty competent people. I'd love to draft them somehow Beyond that, the services of namecheap Ava digit…

What do you use Airtable for? I use it for personal projects and tasks but don’t have any idea of the uses for enterprise.

Not sure if you would call this "enterprise", but for fammesportswear.com, we use Airtable for documenting sample tests, custom system for return handling, maintaining list of suppliers etc.

One issue for us with Google form is that file uploads cannot be done by non-google accounts, this works well in Airtable.

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

#403

Post by user5994461 »

aprdm wrote: post #373
user5994461 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh right that's not much, only 3000 metrics per host. I guess we see more scaling problems because we have more metrics and tags (physical hosts with 128 CPU, imagine the per CPU metrics just to begin with). I spent days as well testing all the collectors and tuning things carefully. That's all very interesting.

Sorry I just picked one datacenter, so, 1/5h of the hosts or 15k metrics per host with some rudimentary math! Our data lives on each datacenter only and then we query cross datacenter via grafana when we need.

Alright. More data in total but less per server because it's distributed.

We run a pair of servers both storing everything. It's the least that can be done to have any resiliency.

I would love to distribute the data, preferably per continent, but prometheus didn't have a good story on sharding. Running independent dataset is worthless in practice without the ability to aggregate. Also, the more servers the more expensive (and they're not easy to procure). Running 6 prometheus servers is in the same ballpark as paying for datadog, so might as well just pay for it.

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

#404

Post by blitmap »

DigitallyFidget wrote: post #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 physic…

What data is being lifted out to ArcGIS? Could you give some examples? Do you have GPS units on your racks or something? I've never used ArcGIS at a very small scale like a building. Are these static maps or dynamic webapps published to a GIS portal?

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

#405

Post by dublin »

user5994461 wrote: post #300
milani wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've used all of Splunk, ELK and Graylog. Should write a longer blog post on the differences. Splunk is miles ahead when it comes to search and visualizations. You can just do things and join that the other tools don't support at all. The only downside is speed, Splunk can only find a few hundreds thousands results a second so it's slow as hell when there are lots of matches. (Kibana doesn't give more than the first…

FWIW, Awk and a good SyslogNG catcher is a really good old-school alternative to all these fancy expensive tools, and there is pretty much nothing that you can't do with them...

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

#406

Post by dublin »

jokab wrote: post #59

1) nimbletext. when clients send me excel sheets with tons of data to import i would generate insert statements in the sheets themselves. this is a painful experience. Then i found out about nimbletext. its pure joy to use. 2) jailer. I'm a visual kind of guy. so this makes database analysis very easy. 3) onenote. if only it had Linux app i would use it for personal use. 4) visual studio 2019. customized to the bone…

+10 for OneNote, especially if you use a modern pen-enabled computer. This may be the best product Microsoft has - it's without question the only reason I pay for an annual Office license. It's a real shame OneNote doesn't get the quality development attention it deserves anymore (the best version was back around Win 8.1). (How about some killer assisted sketching, or at least open up an API for third-party extensions for things like drawing/sketching? A combo of uMakeand a more advanced version of Catchbook embedded into OneNote is my dream app...)

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

#407

Post by jesterson »

throwaway744678 wrote: post #254
jesterson wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at it right now and it does seem to be a wonderful ecosystem with reasonable pricing. Do you happen to know use cases examples that you can share?

Another happy odoo user here: we use it internally for CRM, sales, purchases, accounting, product inventory. We also developped modules to make it the back end of our web/mobile shop, and of our mobile apps. The flexibility is really great, and while I have not used other ERPs, I believe it is easier to develop for, and to use as an end-user. Part of the code is open-source, and you have access to the source of the n…

Thank you for the feedback. You probably won't be willing to share the site/app, but if you do, would you mind if I get a look?

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

#408

Post by danpalmer »

backslash_16 wrote: post #389
danpalmer wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honeycomb has one trick that it does very well, the high dimensionality analysis. Other than that Honeycomb doesn't do a lot, their alerting is basic, their dashboards are basic, etc. Datadog doesn't do that specific feature as well (it has alternatives), but it also has so many other features that all tie together very nicely: metrics, logging, events, very good dashboards, analysis notebooks, alerting, SLOs, perfor…

Can you help me out and define what dimensionaltity means for data? And what high dimensionaltity is? I’m somewhat familiar with monitoring/telemetry but haven’t heard that term before.

Sorry for the late reply. Dimensionality is just the number of dimensions a given record has.

For example, if you have a log line to represent an HTTP request completing it might have a server hostname that processed it, a path, and a request duration – 3 dimensions. High dimensionality is just having lots of dimensions.

Most monitoring systems aren't great at correlating between lots of dimensions, or cost a lot if you want to high cardinality, which high dimensionality contributes to. The cardinality is how many possible options there are for all of the dimensions together (so if you have 3 paths and 2 servers, those two fields have a cardinality of 6, or 6 different places you need to store your request duration for).

When you start getting lots of dimensions and lots of values for each dimension, things start getting expensive and you have to be quite restrained about what you choose to monitor. Maybe you decide not to track duration per server because you hope your servers are roughly the same, whereas you know that URL paths perform differently much of the time.

Honeycomb's great advantage is that they support this high dimensionality/cardinality really well. Not only do they not cost a lot to do it, but they also have a really nice UI for exploring this data and how different bits correlate together, without you having to know up-front what you want to look for. Honeycomb is expensive, but not prohibitively so for some engineering teams.

I'd still recommend Datadog _first_ because it does a lot more for a little less money, but if you're pushing the boundaries of what Datadog is capable of with tracing through distributed systems then Honeycomb enables the next step.

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

#409

Post by user5994461 »

dublin wrote: post #405
user5994461 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used all of Splunk, ELK and Graylog. Should write a longer blog post on the differences. Splunk is miles ahead when it comes to search and visualizations. You can just do things and join that the other tools don't support at all. The only downside is speed, Splunk can only find a few hundreds thousands results a second so it's slow as hell when there are lots of matches. (Kibana doesn't give more than the first…

FWIW, Awk and a good SyslogNG catcher is a really good old-school alternative to all these fancy expensive tools, and there is pretty much nothing that you can't do with them...

I'd certainly recommend syslog-ng rather than logstash, to forward logs to graylog/splunk/kibana.

However there is no alternative to these when it comes to search and accessibility. SSH somewhere and awk is not a real option.

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

#410

Post by vizually »

jbhatab wrote: post #138
darkr wrote: 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.

if you are doing customer reporting, sooner or later you will need these two priority things ( more so than charting features) 1. Delegated authentication ( think Okta) 2. Fine-grained row-level security to slice the same data in the report based on authorization.

We have had good experience with Tableau but had to do some custom Rest API programming for #1 .. Feel free to PM

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