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Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

blog.airbrake.io

21–30 of 33 posts

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#21
post #10

Is there a reason to use any of these services given how trivial it is to set up an open source alternative? You can push errbit to heroku in 5 minutes and you're done. Perhaps there is a level of service here and a business I don't see, and I'm a huge heroku and third party service user, but I don't see the need for a monthly service fee to aggregate and send exception notifications. It's either a self deploy or a f…

It all depends on how much you value your own time. It never takes just 5 min. And over the course of a year it migh easily take hour(s) of development time that is better spent on improving you product.

Heroku does the same thing for example. They are quite expensive if you compare them to running on raw ec2, but when you factor in the time that you need to spend to build and maintain your own infrastructure Heroku "suddenly" looks like a very good deal.

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#22
post #10

Is there a reason to use any of these services given how trivial it is to set up an open source alternative? You can push errbit to heroku in 5 minutes and you're done. Perhaps there is a level of service here and a business I don't see, and I'm a huge heroku and third party service user, but I don't see the need for a monthly service fee to aggregate and send exception notifications. It's either a self deploy or a f…

You can use Airbrake for free (https://airbrakeapp.com/account/new/Free), and it takes about 3 minutes to setup and you don't have to think about it. Sure, you don't get automatic deploy notifications built into Capistrano, but I've certainly upgraded my Airbrake plan for various apps in the past and will do it again.

Why would I want to concern myself with maintaining another app when I can just use Airbrake?

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#24
Errbit (https://github.com/errbit/errbit) is the open source alternative to Airbrake/Hoptoad that provides an identical API so you can continue to use the same gem in your projects, just point it at a different service.

The problem with being a customer on airbrake/exceptional is that you end up paying for crappy customers that send millions of exceptions to their servers putting them under heavy load, if you have a low traffic app then err bit on a free heroku account is a hassle free way of handling exceptions.

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#25
post #9

Whoa! The cheapest Airbrake account costs $79! Are there alternatives to Airbrak & Exceptional?

Weird... it was $5/mo when we signed up less than a year ago. Seems that our price hasn't changed. That said, we're moving away from it. Why? Well, it's practically useless outside of Ruby. The UX assumes Rack/Rails-isms, so the experience is weird for Javascript errors. Beyond that, stack traces aren't good enough to debug many issues; you need logging integration. This is especially true for minified javascript.

What are you moving to?

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#26

Errbit ( https://github.com/errbit/errbit ) is the open source alternative to Airbrake/Hoptoad that provides an identical API so you can continue to use the same gem in your projects, just point it at a different service. The problem with being a customer on airbrake/exceptional is that you end up paying for crappy customers that send millions of exceptions to their servers putting them under heavy load, if you have…

We host a number of low traffic apps on staging our servers, that would push us into the $999/month plan. Which is like 2-3 times as much as we pay for the servers... So for us errbit is worth the time it takes to setup.

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird... it was $5/mo when we signed up less than a year ago. Seems that our price hasn't changed. That said, we're moving away from it. Why? Well, it's practically useless outside of Ruby. The UX assumes Rack/Rails-isms, so the experience is weird for Javascript errors. Beyond that, stack traces aren't good enough to debug many issues; you need logging integration. This is especially true for minified javascript.

What are you moving to?

A mix of syslog, nagios, munin, etc

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#28
post #15

Sounds like it might be time for me to roll a service like this. I used to use Exceptional, but their free plan went away, and I switched to just using exception_notifier to send emails straight to me instead. It's a useful service, but the price point just doesn't work for hobby/small projects.

You might want to check out Errbit, which is a free and open source alternative that can be set up in minutes. https://github.com/errbit/errbit

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#29
post #11

Not being aware of Airbrake prior, I assumed it was a service for transcoding media (i.e. Handbrake in the 'cloud'). Upon learning its actual purpose, it seems like the project is yet-another-candidate for cloning in an open source project so people can it run on their own. As a hobbyist looking to learn more, I have been making a list of services that I could clone the functionality of, in an open source project, to…

I'm a core contributor to Errbit, which is exactly this :) - https://github.com/errbit/errbit

We run it at our organization to monitor 11 applications. One of the major benefits was LDAP authentication, and a custom issue tracker integration.

Re: Airbrake acquired by Exceptional

#30
post #9

Whoa! The cheapest Airbrake account costs $79! Are there alternatives to Airbrak & Exceptional?

Errbit is an awesome self-hosted, open source alternative - https://github.com/errbit/errbit

It's compatible with the Airbrake API, so you just need to configure the Airbrake Notifier gem to point to your Errbit instance.

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