Monitoring for an early product?

[tina8462]

Hey everyone, I’ve worked in DevOps at a handful of startups over the last decade, and monitoring seems to be the last thing on everyone’s mind while building early versions of a product. Building features, moving fast, limited resources—it’s not unreasonable that adding alerts & monitoring isn't top of the list.

So I’ve recently started working on a tool that gives devs the basics of monitoring without the setup or overhead of traditional vendors. Basic metrics and logging, zero-effort setup, and no “hardcore DevOps” experience required.

My goal here is to build the monitoring tool that works for personal projects all the way through products with 100k users. I think I can help devs even before scale understand where there might be bottlenecks, a memory leak, or user churn.

I’m curious, what do y’all think? I, as well as a ton of my friends into side projects & startups + people I follow seem to never get around to monitoring, so I figured what if they didn’t have to spend time on this, and a tool just did it all for them?

Am I over complicating it? Is this interesting to you? What do you want to monitor if you're building a product and before you have lots of scale?

I'd love your feedback and discussion about this.

edit: I created an early interest list if you'd like to follow along on my progress https://learn.zeet.co/monitoring-for-startups

 

[haithai01]

@tina8462 you didn’t really mention monitoring of what metrics

 

[tina8462]

@haithai01 Sure, a few monitors that I'm thinking are website uptime & latency, downtime for 3rd party APIs (e.g. stripe, openAI), memory, cpu, and disk for databases & AWS services (e.g. EKS). I'm also thinking about doing some level of profiling for NextJS and Python and share metrics around that.

Are there any metrics you think are relevant for products still in development, or live product before they are reaching massive scale?

 

[mohmed]

@tina8462 You can add Sentry or NewRelic with a few lines of code. What exactly are you trying to build? Simplified version of well known services?

 

[tina8462]

@mohmed I'm trying to build a tool that is best fit for devs and small teams who are building in the stages before massive scale. Sentry & New Relic are tools I love, but have more value when there is maturity of team and higher scale than what I'm thinking. So I'm trying to build something for the specific needs of indy devs and new product development.

 

[cameroonberry]

@tina8462 I could use something like this. Monitoring is necessary, yet I always find myself neglecting it for the first like 5 months building something. If this is as easy as you say, I'd probably use

 

[kaithar]

@tina8462 Prometheus is available in Ubuntu server as a snap package if you’re looking for something internal.

 

[thebiblealone]

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