Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps

leansentry.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 14 posts

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

#4

Post by mvolo »

mijustin wrote: post #3

How would something like this compare to a product like New Relic?

Hi mijustin, founder here.

LeanSentry is somewhat similar to New Relic in that we provide server and application performance monitoring.

However, we are 100% focused on the Windows Server/IIS/ASP.NET stack (that's our background), and as a result provide deeper analysis and diagnostics for those applications.

Best, Mike

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

#5

Post by meaty »

A few comments:

1. We're probably not going to use it unless we can host it ourselves because we can't possibly risk information leaking out of the infrastructure and being thrown god knows where.

2. If all it does is IIS/ASP.Net applications, the utility is limited. Everything is about holistic tools which can aggregate everything in one place from all systems. In our situation, we monitor piles of SQL Servers, nearly 100 IIS servers, MSMQ, NServiceBus, Routers, Switches, Disk array IO throughput. One tool to rule them all there.

3. I doubt you could actually handle the load of a mid-large site where this would be valuable. What are your guarantees on that front?

Not wishing to trash your efforts, but that's how us architects see it and we're the guys with the credit cards :)

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

#7

Post by jolt »

meaty wrote: post #5

A few comments: 1. We're probably not going to use it unless we can host it ourselves because we can't possibly risk information leaking out of the infrastructure and being thrown god knows where. 2. If all it does is IIS/ASP.Net applications, the utility is limited. Everything is about holistic tools which can aggregate everything in one place from all systems. In our situation, we monitor piles of SQL Servers, near…

1. We use GA but this is still my main concern. This kind of data seems to sensitive to be hosted by someone else.

2. There seems to be some SQL stuff in there - IO would be a nice addition though.

3. This could be a problem. Let us host the app our self, and we might be able to handle it?

With that in mind, i would love to have this as a part of my daily toolset.

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

#8

Post by mvolo »

meaty wrote: post #5

A few comments: 1. We're probably not going to use it unless we can host it ourselves because we can't possibly risk information leaking out of the infrastructure and being thrown god knows where. 2. If all it does is IIS/ASP.Net applications, the utility is limited. Everything is about holistic tools which can aggregate everything in one place from all systems. In our situation, we monitor piles of SQL Servers, near…

Hi meaty,

You are right, most APM tools are working on covering multiple platforms. We are trying to provide extra depth into the Windows Server platform because thats what we know (for example, I used to be the PM for IIS 7 / ASP.NET).

Our goal is to be able to help you with more than just giving you the info to monitor your apps, but really give you the expert analysis of it. A better example is, you might hire a consultant to help you tune up your app, or have your developers get training on performance tuning. Those developers will then potentially use New Relic or Redgate tools to support them in doing their work.

In our world, you just use our product and receive that level of expertise automatically from our service. Without having to hire those consultants or have your engineers spend their time learning about the insides of IIS.

Re: leaking information. If you are not comfortable with leaking information, you are not using the new SAAS APM tools like us or New Relic. Thats certainly your tradeoff to make. I have to say though, we worked really hard to make sure we dont collect sensitive data:

- We dont load a profiler/debugger into your application like most other APMs (e.g. New Relic). We collect only external information, which does include errors/stack traces but no data/code/cookies/etc.

- We provide a mode where our monitoring service is sandboxed to a non-production vm in your environment, so nothing to install on prod servers.

Re: scale. We've handled Viddy.com, Vevo.com, etc. Are you larger? We do a lot of engineering to reduce the data volume and process it effectively while maintaining high resolution. Tell us what your specs are and we can tell you if we can do it.

Best, Mike

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

#9

Post by mvolo »

jolt wrote: post #7
meaty wrote: post #5

A few comments: 1. We're probably not going to use it unless we can host it ourselves because we can't possibly risk information leaking out of the infrastructure and being thrown god knows where. 2. If all it does is IIS/ASP.Net applications, the utility is limited. Everything is about holistic tools which can aggregate everything in one place from all systems. In our situation, we monitor piles of SQL Servers, near…

1. We use GA but this is still my main concern. This kind of data seems to sensitive to be hosted by someone else. 2. There seems to be some SQL stuff in there - IO would be a nice addition though. 3. This could be a problem. Let us host the app our self, and we might be able to handle it? With that in mind, i would love to have this as a part of my daily toolset.

hi jolt,

I hear your sentiment re: hosting LeanSentry yourself. We actually started this way, but over time realized that in order to support our data processing and analysis needs, we needed to host this in our own data center. The majority of our customers didnt think twice - they just install it and done.

This model has been proven by New Relic as well - just look at their growth numbers over the last few years.

Certainly there will be people that are more concerned about security, and we get a fair share of them talking to us. The best we can say is, we've done everything we can to make LeanSentry safe (see my earlier comment) while still preserving the value we provide.

Best, Mike

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

#10

Post by wingspan »

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!).

Post reply on HN