
Launch HN: Lazy Lantern (YC S19) – Detect Meaningful Patterns in Your Analytics - GuiloLa
Hello HN,<p>We are Bastien, Guillaume and Alex, founders of Lazy Lantern (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lazylantern.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lazylantern.com</a>). We work on detecting what really matters as it happens in your website or app.<p>As software engineers in various companies, we repeatedly got overwhelmed by the amount of product analytics we had to keep track of. What specific metrics are you supposed to monitor when you have dozens or hundreds of them, each metric having contextual information about the user, device type, location, language, etc.? This can represent thousands to millions of useful sub-metrics. Despite spending significant time monitoring analytics dashboards on Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Grafana and more, we had to keep track of so many metrics and user segments that impactful events regularly went unnoticed. We often missed technical incidents, but also business opportunities such as not knowing that a feature really moved the needle or that there was sudden adoption for a specific user group.<p>We started Lazy Lantern to build an automated way of analyzing any number of metrics in real-time. The goal is to provide a good picture of impactful events as they happen, both in the case of negative anomalies (outages, bugs, crashes) and positive anomalies (virality, marketing, growth). In practice, we automatically detect abnormal patterns for each metric, in particular temporary spikes&#x2F;drops, level changes, trend changes and seasonality changes. In case of anomaly, we surface the user segments that are most affected and we group correlated anomalies together to give you a better picture of what parts of the product are impacted.<p>On the implementation side, there were a couple of requirements for an effective anomaly detection algorithm. It has to be:<p>- Autonomous: avoiding manual configuration to be able to scale to arbitrarily high numbers of metrics<p>- Unsupervised: being able to detect anomalies for all types of businesses without knowing beforehand what a typical anomaly for each business looks like<p>- Dynamic: accommodating all kinds of seasonalities and trends, which excludes using static thresholds<p>- Fast: deciding whether a data point is indicative of an incident in minimal time<p>To fulfill these requirements, we first tried the Holt-Winters seasonal models, but finally got the best results with a procedure based upon Facebook’s Prophet forecasting model. To provide a better sense of each anomaly’s severity as well as what areas of the product are affected, we integrated two additional functionalities:<p>- Anomaly severity scoring based on the number of impacted users, deviation from prediction and anomaly duration<p>- Anomaly grouping using a reproduction of VARCLUS, which groups metrics by clusters based on their partial correlations<p>For this initial launch, we are targeting Segment customers, which makes enabling our product a breeze. If people find it useful, we will provide wider support. Pricing is based on the number of metrics you want to track. If you email us at contact@lazylantern.com mentioning this post, we’ll extend the free trial to 3 months. If you are interested, sign up in one minute on our website at www.lazylantern.com.<p>We’d love to know if you think this product might be useful to you or if there is a better way to approach the problem. Thank you!
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dimitry12
Love how cleverly minimal this is: using Segment as input and Slack as UI!
Good job with product design!

The service itself is certainly useful.

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amacenov
Really cool stuff guys! Both the product packaging and the tech approach, love
it. Wish you best of luck!

If you care to share, curious to learn more about anomaly grouping - what's
the business goal there, which features go into analysis (all or just the ones
with anomalies) and how you interpret clusters.

Cheers!

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shostack
Sounds interesting. Wish there were case studies and some way to view
screenshots full screen. I never got why analytics tools make the screenshots
impossible to enlarge and see details with given how important UI and such can
be in some cases.

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GuiloLa
Noted! We're currently working on adding case studies and we'll take this
opportunity to make the screenshots clickable.

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shostack
Cool, good stuff. Thanks for being open to the feedback (in hindsight I could
have worded it a bit more constructively).

For context, I look at a lot of analytics tool sites, and there's just little
things that give me good or bad vibes from screenshots that inform whether it
may be worth a deeper dive. Things like "does the UI look like it is more than
an afterthought?" or "how friendly would this be for non-technical business
users on my team?" or "does the UI indicate any functionality not explicitly
called out elsewhere that seems like it meets some of my needs?"

All of this is to aid me in a quick filtering decision of whether something is
worth further time investment, since I try to avoid unnecessary sales calls or
just signing up for the sake of getting basic questions answered.

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littleboi1998
Love the name a ton. Keep it.

Also, I really like the product.

