Show HN: HyperDX – open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative

It's a relatively ok priced system which has almost everything: server and client performance, alerts, dashboards, logs, profiling, tracing, etc. It's not amazing and has some issues, but it's one place to get lots of things you want and it's good enough for many. I wouldn't say gold-standard, but rather a benchmark for "you have to be this tall to play the observability product game".

First paragraph https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

"HyperDX helps engineers figure out why production is broken faster by centralizing and correlating logs, metrics, traces, exceptions and session replays in one place. An open source and developer-friendly alternative to Datadog and New Relic."

Just perfect. Bravo.

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As a merc, I never understood the why of Datadog (or equiv). The teams and projects I rotated thru each embraced the "LOG ALL THE THINGS!" strategy. No guiding purpose, no esthetics. General agreement about need to improve signal to noise ratio. But little courage or gumption to act. And any such efforts would be easily rebuffed by citing the parable of Chesterfordstorm's Fences of Doom and something something about velocity.

Late last century, IT projects, like CRMs and ERPs, were plagued by over collection of data. Opaque provenance, dubious (data) quality, unclear ownership, subtractive value propositions (where the whole is worth less than the parts). No, no, don't remove that field. We might need it some day.

Today's "analytics" projects are the same, right? Every drive-by stakeholder tosses in a few tags, some misc fields, a little extra meta. And before anyone can say "kanban", the stone soup accreted enough mass to become a gravity well threatening implosion dragging the entire org-chart into the gapping maw of our universe's newest black hole.

Am I wrong?

But logging is useful, right? Or at least has that potential.

The last time I designed a system end-to-end, that's kinda what we did. Listed all the kinds of things we wanted to log. Sorta settled on formats and content (never really ever done). Did regular log bashs to explain and clear anomalies. Scripts for grooming and archiving. (For one team I rotated thru, most of their spend was on just cloudwatch. Hysterical.)

But my stuff wasn't B2C, so wasn't tainted by the attention economy, manufactured outrage, or recommenders. No tags, referrers, campaigns, etc. It was just about keeping the system up and true. And resolving customer support incidents asap.

Does any one talk or write about this? (Those SRE themed novels are now buried deep in my to read pile.)

I'd like some cookbooks or blue prints which show some idealized logging strategies, with depictions of common enough troubleshooting scenarios.

Having something authoritative to cite could reduce my semblance to an Eeyore. "Hey, team mates, you know what'd be really great?! Correlation IDs! So we can see how an action percolates thru our system!"

Just curious.

PS- Datadog's server hexagon map/chart thingie is something else. The kind of innovation that wins prizes.

Just want to heap on with the praise here and say that this was definitely the best experience I've had with any tool trying to add monitoring for a Next.js full-stack application. The Client Sessions tab where I, out of the box, can correlate front-end actions and back-end operations for a particular user is especially nice.

Great job!

Oh yeah browsers are really just another service (and that's what we try to treat it as, as well!) and it's really the same set of questions you'd ask of any service, but for some reason the tooling completely stops either at the frontend or at the backend.

As for monospace font - feedback received! Is there a particular section you think is too overwhelming? (search page, nav bar, etc.) We've been thinking of how can we balance between the ease of monospace for reading instead of having it literally the default on every UI surface :P