
Ask HN: Built a generic monitoring service – which niche to target? - curioustom
So I&#x27;ve built a generic monitoring service with Grafana, InfluxDB, Riemann etc. and modified the Grafana UI to support payments.<p>My problem now is what niche should I target for monitoring so I don&#x27;t compete with the big guys like Datadog. I saw products like cronitor who target cron monitoring. Any ideas on a specific niche that is underserved with monitoring?
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cnocito
Are you concentrating on system/OS monitoring or application monitoring? Also,
what price point are you thinking about? Cloud or on premises?

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curioustom
As for pricing - looks like it would be niche dependent. I was thinking of
nothing less than $99/month and then up since I probably could not support
many small customers on a lower price point.

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cnocito
So it's hard do charge anything or much for OS/Systems because there are so
many free tools (it doesn't take long at all to deploy ELK + metricbeat for
example). I would concentrate on applications, but then you are competing with
DD and Librato anyways, unless you can cover applications that they don't
monitor because they are too complex (I can't think of any though). I think
the questions more than what niche to go after is what added value can you
provide.

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TobyGiacometti
I've used Zabbix before for monitoring a server environment of moderate size.
The flexibility led to certain things not being very simple to configure. So
your idea of targeting a niche is certainly a good one, you can make your
product easier to use. The 2 areas that would be most useful for me are cron
and database monitoring.

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curioustom
Looks like two people are recommending databases.

Is monitoring cron or databases something you would pay for? Would you be
interested in being a trial customer?

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TobyGiacometti
I am currently not managing any server environments anymore, so there is
nothing to try it out with, but thank you for the offer! :) I certainly would
have paid for it though...

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bostonhacker
Maybe you try to target one of the databases? I could see a PostgreSQL or Solr
monitoring SaaS focused just on those?

