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Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

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Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#51

Post by crazy5sheep »

englambert wrote: post #44
hangonhn wrote: post #39

Damn. That's one hell of a set of credentials for the founders. I was the engineer who was heavily involved with monitoring at my last job and a lot of what this is doing aligns with what I would have done myself. At my new job, I work on different stuff but I can see we're going to run into monitoring issues soon too. I'm so, so, so glad this is an option because I do not want to rebuild that stuff all over again. G…

Hey, thank you. :-) That’s kind of how we feel -- it seems like everyone is building tooling around Prometheus, and frankly, we hope that collective effort can hopefully be redirected to more impactful value creation for our industry. On a personal note, most of us on the team have been there in one way or another, struggling to actually monitor our own work. We’ve had surprise Datadog bills and felt the pain of scal…

Prometheus is great, the main problem is the bloat of metrics it's collecting. one really needs to carefully define the rules to scrape, compute, reduce and filter the ones that are not needed and the ones that need to precompute.

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#52

Post by tailspin2019 »

Nicely designed site, great logo, but after clicking around a bit (and looking at GitHub) I’m confused by what this product actually is.

DataDog has a UI. Does Opstrace? Or is it just a CLI/API based tool?

If you actually have a UI element to your product you’re doing a huge disservice to yourself by not actually showing this anywhere...

EDIT: I don’t mean to sound negative, I’m wondering if positioning this against Datadog is going to create immediate, potentially incorrect, expectations in people’s minds as to what this product might provide.

From first impressions I’d say this is much closer to Prometheus (which does have a UI but it’s so basic it may as well not - but then the UI is not the point of Prometheus).

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#53

Post by fat-apple »

richardw wrote: post #48

Point around incentives: We use Dynatrace. I’m sure it’s an eye-watering price but I do like that everyone who wants a license can get one. I don’t have to consider costs to add an entire dev team and teach them how to use it. It also means an entire dev team knows how to use it for future jobs.

We certainly don't want to create an adverse incentive where you would consider limiting the number of devs who had access to the monitoring system. There are trade-offs but we think that per-seat pricing (like GitLab, GitHub) actually does make it much easier to budget and plan for monitoring spend. Generally, a headcount plan is more predictable than the data your application generates. For example, a single engineer can add (and maybe should be adding) far more metrics and logs to their applications to monitor it correctly. They should not also be worried about breaking the budget when doing so. Does this make sense to you - what do you think?

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#54

Post by sneak »

> We will always be open source, and we make money by charging a per-user subscription for our commercial version which will contain fine-grained authz, bring-your-own OIDC and custom domains.

Seems to me that these are at odds. If you're open source, why does anyone have to pay for these things?

If you're open core, I think it's mighty misleading to say things like "We will always be open source" because then not only is it untrue on its face, but also if someone contributes useful features to the open source project that compete with or supplant your paid proprietary bits, you are incentivized to refuse to merge their work - extremely not in the spirit of open source.

My perspective, which you asked for, is that open core is dishonest, and that you should be honest with yourselves about being a proprietary software vendor if that's indeed your plan, and stop with the open source posturing.

If I've misunderstood you, then I apologize.

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#55

Post by kazinator »

sneak wrote: post #54

> We will always be open source, and we make money by charging a per-user subscription for our commercial version which will contain fine-grained authz, bring-your-own OIDC and custom domains. Seems to me that these are at odds. If you're open source, why does anyone have to pay for these things? If you're open core, I think it's mighty misleading to say things like "We will always be open source" because then not on…

I'm gonna put on my St. Ignucius robe here, and say that yes, that behavior is within the limits of "open source".

If they used "free software" language, then we might have a case for posturing.

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#56

Post by englambert »

crazy5sheep wrote: post #51
englambert wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thank you. :-) That’s kind of how we feel -- it seems like everyone is building tooling around Prometheus, and frankly, we hope that collective effort can hopefully be redirected to more impactful value creation for our industry. On a personal note, most of us on the team have been there in one way or another, struggling to actually monitor our own work. We’ve had surprise Datadog bills and felt the pain of scal…

Prometheus is great, the main problem is the bloat of metrics it's collecting. one really needs to carefully define the rules to scrape, compute, reduce and filter the ones that are not needed and the ones that need to precompute.

You’re absolutely right.

As mentioned earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25993825), our goal is to be super transparent; we want you to fully understand what you’re spending on infrastructure. We feel good that there’s an incentive to help you work through the problems that you’ve mentioned.

Attributing collection and querying is made easier with authentication enabled by default. You can make your tenants as fine- or coarse-grained as you want, handing out authentication tokens to the producers writing to those tenants. This makes it easier to trace back to sources of bloat. You can also place rate limits on individual tenants to prevent bloat in the first place.

Additionally, we think users might reconsider the premise of the problem. Because the cost of running Opstrace follows cloud economics (because it runs in your own cloud account), it's basically as cheap as it can possibly be. So you might consider that you do not have as much pressure to curate what is stored as you think. (I didn’t say "no" pressure, but "less" might be a huge improvement. :-) )

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#57

Post by nickbp »

rubiquity wrote: post #49

Nice. I've talked myself out of starting a monitoring product at least a few dozen times. As you point out, customers either get to choose between being gouged or run their own spaghetti. On top of bad UX, I do think the storage layer is where customers are really getting hit by these companies. The big players are using very unoptimized ingestion and querying layers and pretending like tiered storage never happened.…

That's the plan! The incumbent SaaS providers are effectively charging a premium over the underlying storage. Their business is really reselling storage. Removing that premium via a self-hosted system then greatly reduces the need to structure your applications to fit the cost of monitoring it. This also means that any negotiated discounts and features they may use (e.g., S3 Standard-IA) are also applicable to data in Opstrace.

We will also have a blog post about bad UX in a couple weeks… stay tuned. What are some of your biggest gripes about UX?

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#58

Post by fat-apple »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #52

Nicely designed site, great logo, but after clicking around a bit (and looking at GitHub) I’m confused by what this product actually is. DataDog has a UI. Does Opstrace? Or is it just a CLI/API based tool? If you actually have a UI element to your product you’re doing a huge disservice to yourself by not actually showing this anywhere... EDIT: I don’t mean to sound negative, I’m wondering if positioning this against…

Thanks for that feedback - we've got a lot of work to do to make that more clear! We're still early in our journey so we’re not there yet, but we’re moving fast. We're working on a new collaborative UI for interacting with your data in a way that solves a lot of problems we've witnessed with current monitoring UIs (let me know if you want more detail). It's in early development and we haven't released it yet, so while Opstrace does have a UI now, it's currently limited to system management (adding/removing users and tenants). For interacting with data, we currently ship a Grafana instance per tenant. The roadmap has some basic information about this (might not be something you stumbled across). Let me know if I can clarify anything else. https://opstrace.com/docs/references/roadmap

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#59

Post by fat-apple »

e12e wrote: post #38
nickbp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, this is Nick Parker from the Opstrace team. I personally have my own on-prem arm64/amd64 K3s cluster, including a basic 4-node Minio deployment, so I’m very interested in getting local deployment up and running myself. We’re a small team and we’ve been focusing on getting a couple well-defined use-cases in order before adding support for running Opstrace in custom and on-prem environments. It turns into a bit of…

This looks like an interesting product. We're figuring out our monitoring stack - but have also found Loki/Grafana - and we're looking at Victoria Metrics rather than Cortex. Our hope is that the combination will turn out to be able to scale down as well as up, and be possible to fit in with Docker swarm/compose on-prem and at digital ocean. Also looks like vector might be a good option for collecting data. Will keep…

Curious to learn more about the tradeoffs you’ve found between Cortex and Victoria Metrics and why you could be drawn to one more than the other?

Re: Launch HN: Opstrace (YC S19) – open-source Datadog

#60

Post by Denzel »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #52

Nicely designed site, great logo, but after clicking around a bit (and looking at GitHub) I’m confused by what this product actually is. DataDog has a UI. Does Opstrace? Or is it just a CLI/API based tool? If you actually have a UI element to your product you’re doing a huge disservice to yourself by not actually showing this anywhere... EDIT: I don’t mean to sound negative, I’m wondering if positioning this against…

The headline feels deliberately clickbait-y and disingenuous. I love and support the idea. Aspirationally, the founders may want to compete with Datadog, but OpsTrace overlaps some small percentage of Datadog’s feature set.

I’m surprised the mods haven’t edited this title.

Source: I’m an engineer that’s used, operated and hacked on a medium-sized prom+grafana; and used Datadog at a large, multi-region, global scale.

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