from Hacker News

Show HN: DevRaven – Monitoring for Developers

by kc10 on 7/31/22, 4:46 PM with 34 comments

Hi HN! I am Krishna Thota, founder of DevRaven. DevRaven is a monitoring platform for Developers.

DevRaven enables engineering teams or individual developers to setup active monitoring for their services/applications and get alerted when things don't work as expected

Today's launch makes available the following features:

API Monitoring - Monitor your HTTP end points and perform no-code or scripted assertions.

Synthetic Monitoring - Execute browser based end-to-end tests using Playwright framework. No setup required.

SSL Monitoring - Monitor SSL certificates for your end points and get alerted before they expire.

Web Page Monitoring - Run continuous Lighthouse audits on your web pages to ensure best performance, SEO.

Welcome any feedback, questions or suggestions.

  • by paulgb on 7/31/22, 5:17 PM

    This is very timely for something I've been wanting to do! Giving it a try now.

    Edit: tried it. I like it, I hadn't used playwright before but it was fairly straightforward to set up the test I wanted. Since you requested feedback, some thoughts:

    - I started by writing and testing my check locally, and then copied it over into a “synthetic test”. It would be cool if that were more seamless, e.g. if all of my tests were configured through a git repo and DevRaven had a GitHub webhook that was notified when the config changed.

    - I had to double-escape some backslashes in my code for it to be accepted, you might be eating the escapes during some string processing?

    - It would be cool to see timings of tests (i.e. the time between individual asserts as reported by playwright, but even the overall time would be a useful metric).

    - This is probably just my inexperience with playwright, but it would be nice to have an example that used playwright's expect function instead of chai.

    - TypeScript support would also be nice.

  • by CSMastermind on 7/31/22, 6:11 PM

    Hi Krishna, congrats on the launch!

    I really like that you have the 'try with no credit card' offering, I wish more companies would do this.

    One question I'd have for you is how _your_ services are hosted. If my service is hosted on AWS us-east-1 and so is my monitoring I'll be worried that I'm not going to get alerted when AWS itself has problems.

    It seems to me that you're entering into a crowded market. I can think of a dozen or more companies with similar offering. How do you plan on differentiating yourself? Who is the target user for your product and why would they select it instead of a competitor?

  • by Sytten on 7/31/22, 6:22 PM

    What differentiate you from the number of existing monitoring platforms? Genuinely curious as it is a crowded space with a lot of established players.
  • by hunterb123 on 7/31/22, 8:24 PM

    This is an area that needs to be fleshed out, so far the best solution I've found is https://checklyhq.com/

    Playwright + other monitoring checks as a service is amazing.

    You do have to make your tests pretty resilient to prevent false positives through (retry on network issues etc.)

    The Playwright test framework helps with that.

  • by a-dub on 7/31/22, 8:55 PM

    this looks nice. generous free tier! seconding the idea that it would be nice if gitops (flat config files in git) was a first class interface to configure everything. that would be a differentiator for me.
  • by leonardinius on 7/31/22, 7:28 PM

    Hi Krishna, Great product you have put there.

    What is the long term plan wrt pricing, what should I expect if I sign up?

    Like the clarity of the home page, well done and good luck!

  • by leetrout on 7/31/22, 6:05 PM

    Nice work!

    Any plans to support cron monitoring / time of day monitoring? Something akin to cronitor?

  • by wdb on 8/1/22, 12:55 AM

    Never understand why these kind of services only support PagerDuty. What about Opsgenie
  • by dogweather on 8/1/22, 12:08 AM

    I use Checkly. Any idea how this compares?
  • by ushakov on 7/31/22, 8:14 PM

    why would i use your proprietary product when there are (lots!) of open-source alternatives available?
  • by bdcravens on 7/31/22, 6:42 PM

    How many is on the DevRaven team?
  • by jibnair on 7/31/22, 7:11 PM

    Love the simplicity !