
Tracelytics: Google Dapper for the Rest of Us - seliopou
http://www.tracelytics.com/
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runako
I found the website interesting, but I didn't see any pricing information
(apologies if I missed it). Without pricing information, I don't know if it
makes sense to fill out the registration form to try it out.

I'd suggest making pricing prominent, especially since folks will compare you
to New Relic anyway. Are you "New Relic, but with more features, that costs
10x more" or "New Relic, but with fewer features, that costs half as much" or
something else?

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halostatue
Definitely missing the pricing information. I'm looking to bake in analytics
in a new app that I'm working on…this looks good, but I can't even take the
time to try it unless I know it's going to be cost-effective.

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faulkner8
We are an early customer of Tracelytics. We are also a happy New Relic
customer. They are both great tools and not necessarily an "either or"
decision. New Relic gives great info about what is slow from a single app
perspective...being able to trace down to the layer where the issue is.

Tracelytics, on the other hand, tracks across applications and down to the
individual machine serving each part of the request. This means that I can
track each individual request through multiple applications/services as the
request traverses different physical machines.

This has become important as our infrastructure has grown to the point where
we might have 20-30 machines in a particular layer. When an app server, or
network interface, or something else unforeseen goes wonky, it is extremely
challenging to determine specifically what is causing the problem and where it
is. With Tracelyitics, if I go into my dashboard and see that the 500 errors
are all coming from a single physical server, I can take that machine out of
the loop, remove the problem from the production environment, and then
troubleshoot the bad box.

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drewda
I've had good luck with New Relic* although on first glance I'm not sure if it
offers as comprehensive a monitoring service as this system.

* <http://newrelic.com/features/performance-analytics>

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trjordan
(Disclaimer: I'm one of the engineers at Tracelytics)

Tracelytics has two big features that New Relic doesn't have:

\- Support for service oriented architectures. We'll show you what called
what, and how the caller affects the callee's performance.

\- More flexible filtering throughout the app. We let you filter on URLs,
controllers/actions, custom-defined apps, even memcache keys or SQL queries,
and carry these filters around with you go from page to page. It really helps
isolate a problem with, for instance, a memcache call that only originates
from one URL.

Now, obviously I'm biased, but I think that these two can make a big
difference, especially when you're trying to track down a performance problem
for the first time.

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manuelflara
How exactly can you tell exact controllers/actions in the code? Do we need to
include some custom code in our PHP (in this case) code for that to work? We
use NewRelic right now, and all that the "code performance" part of it shows
is index.php, which is the dispatcher of our framework. Obviously, not very
helpful.

P.S. I posted a related question on Quora recently, maybe you'd like to weight
in: [http://www.quora.com/How-is-Tracelytics-better-than-New-
Reli...](http://www.quora.com/How-is-Tracelytics-better-than-New-Relic)

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trjordan
In the frameworks we instrument, we grab that information for you at the
appropriate point.

In the case of vanilla PHP, the concept of controller and action is less well-
defined, so we provide a function that you can use to log controller/action
information you have in whatever routing class/function/layer you have.

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moe
The screenshots and narrative don't provide nearly enough information to
warrant a registration. There's not even a price-tag, will this cost $10 a
month or $1000? How does it hook into my infrastructure, do you provide
plugins (for which platforms?), is it a daemon, kernel modules, SNMP?

You should really provide a live-demo or at least a screencast so potential
buyers can get a remote idea of what they're looking at here.

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trjordan
In response to your second question, we provides two things:

\- A set of add-on packages in the format of choice for the component we're
instrumenting -- Ruby gems, Apache modules, etc. Full support list is here:
<http://www.tracelytics.com/features/#!/supported-platforms>

\- A daemon that runs on each machine that is tracing, which collects the
partial traces and ships them back to our servers.

We're working on a more complete try-before-you-install experience. If you'd
like, shoot me an email (my username at traceltyics) and I'll keep you
updated.

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bhickey
Best of luck guys!

(I briefly lived with Spiros, and once got sucked punched outside of Chris's
house.)

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tluyben2
Is there an API ? We would want to import this information into our own system
as we wouldn't want to use multiple systems; same for our clients.

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seliopou
Thanks for the question. At the moment we don't expose an API to our customers
though it is in the works. We've definitely heard this request from enough
people to make it real.

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masonhensley
Looks nifty. FYI- Your website is kinda goofy on an iPad. Your divs were
moving all over the place. (safari, iOS5, iPad 1)

Good luck.

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cobrabyte
Sooooo tiny on an iPad. Looks like a postage stamp when it first comes up. You
have to zoom-in to do anything.

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kermitthehermit
An open source piece of software to do this would be greatly appreciated.

Does anything like this exist?

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dkuebric
Both Dapper and Tracelytics borrow ideas from the X-Trace project, which has a
bit of source available, though not much.

<http://x-trace.net/wiki/doku.php>

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tonyarkles
My masters' thesis involves X-Trace, along with pieces for tracing common
pieces of the web stack. I'm not ready to open-source it yet, but it's a
definite possibility. I've published a preview of it at ICPE 2011,
[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958746.1958783&coll=D...](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958746.1958783&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=67091461&CFTOKEN=53739747)

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kermitthehermit
If you do decide to open source it, you can be sure it will be appreciated.

You can also use it as a resume.

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foobarbazetc
How is it like Dapper when it doesn't support Java? :)

