

Show HN: LeanSentry - Better Monitoring for Windows Server Apps - ivolo
https://www.leansentry.com

======
btb
Interesting product, considering trying it out. A few questions

1\. I gather from reading the How-it-works pages that the monitoring service
is not invasive. How about the optional agent, how invasive is that and does
it carry extra performance impact? I cant see anywhere explained what it does,
and how much of the functionality that depends on it

2\. On your demo site, in one of the alerts you slow causes of slow queries.
It says "SQL query "dbo.spSlowNumbers" caused slow responses on
"/Profile/Save". How does your service know the name of the stored proc? Does
it hook into SQL server calls or?

3\. Is it safe to install on a production webserver? Was thinking we would try
it out on one of our 5 webservers.

4\. Is it easy to remove the monitoring service+agent again if we dont like
it?

Thanks

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mvolo
Hi, founder here.

1\. You are absolutely right, the agent is an optional component. Without the
agent, you get most of LeanSentry's monitoring features without having to
install ANYTHING on your production servers.

2\. We know the name of the stored procedure/SQL query from monitoring ADO.NET
activity externally via ETW, the high speed event tracing in windows. We do
not actually connect to your SQL server for this.

3\. We worked hard to make sure LeanSentry is safe for production environments
(thats what its for). We also designed it so it can be completely sandboxed in
production. Most importantly, it will never load anything into your
application directly, unlike debuggers or profilers, and has no chance of
crashing your application.

The agent adds some deeper diagnostic capabilities, including SQL query/IIS
module/REST call monitoring, CPU profiling, etc. It does have a bit more
overhead since you have to install it on the actual production server, but we
worked hard to make sure it keeps a low footprint (and even shuts itself down
if something goes wrong causing higher utilization).

4\. You can remove the monitoring service and the agent anytime. We provide
the configuration script for servers as a batch file so its easy to see the
changes we make.

These are great questions - if you have more, hit us up on chat on our
website!

Best, Mike

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meaty
A few comments:

1\. We're probably not going to use it unless we can host it ourselves because
we can't possibly risk information leaking out of the infrastructure and being
thrown god knows where.

2\. If all it does is IIS/ASP.Net applications, the utility is limited.
Everything is about holistic tools which can aggregate everything in one place
from all systems. In our situation, we monitor piles of SQL Servers, nearly
100 IIS servers, MSMQ, NServiceBus, Routers, Switches, Disk array IO
throughput. One tool to rule them all there.

3\. I doubt you could actually handle the load of a mid-large site where this
would be valuable. What are your guarantees on that front?

Not wishing to trash your efforts, but that's how us architects see it and
we're the guys with the credit cards :)

~~~
jolt
1\. We use GA but this is still my main concern. This kind of data seems to
sensitive to be hosted by someone else.

2\. There seems to be some SQL stuff in there - IO would be a nice addition
though.

3\. This could be a problem. Let us host the app our self, and we might be
able to handle it?

With that in mind, i would love to have this as a part of my daily toolset.

~~~
mvolo
hi jolt,

I hear your sentiment re: hosting LeanSentry yourself. We actually started
this way, but over time realized that in order to support our data processing
and analysis needs, we needed to host this in our own data center. The
majority of our customers didnt think twice - they just install it and done.

This model has been proven by New Relic as well - just look at their growth
numbers over the last few years.

Certainly there will be people that are more concerned about security, and we
get a fair share of them talking to us. The best we can say is, we've done
everything we can to make LeanSentry safe (see my earlier comment) while still
preserving the value we provide.

Best, Mike

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geraldomagella
Hi there, Just a quick comment, we're using LeanSentry to monitor 50 servers
and it's being great! We are a brazilian e-Learning SaaS solution provider and
the information that we're getting is helping us polish our application and
ensure our customers a great service level. We find new uses for it on a daily
basis. Our Product manager, sales, developers CEO, CIO, CFO... everyone uses
it as the information is "readable" to everyone, not just tech gurus... As you
can set things up in matter of minutes it's definitely worth a try.

------
wingspan
Looks cool, certainly seems to provide value above and beyond typical
monitoring tools.

It would be great if there was a simple calculator on the pricing page, to
give a really quick and rough estimate for how much we'd be paying, especially
considering the volume discounts and prepay. E.g. 30 large Azure instances for
one year. By my calculations that would work out to ~$2300/mo when prepaying
for a year (ouch!).

~~~
mvolo
Hi there wingspan, founder here.

We are making the pricing page more accessible, should be live later tonight.

Re: the pricing for 30 servers.

1\. If you use our Core plan, which gives you all our features except the
automatic troubleshooters and expert insights, you will pay about $610/month
on an annual plan.

2\. If you use the Advanced plan, that means you are finding enough value in
us automatically resolving your problems and giving you proactive guidance. On
that plan, you are paying 2295/month on an annual plan.

I know this might sounds like a lot, but its actually reasonably lower than
some of our cheaper APM competitors. The bottom line though is, if you are
professionally running a web application, this is chump change compared to the
time this saves you:

\- If you are a 1 person shop with 5 servers lets say, you may be paying
~150/month. If we just saved you 3 hours this month, you paid for it already.

\- If you are a company with 30 servers, you probably have a lot more at stake
in making sure your servers run well. But also, you probably employ several
full time developers and ops people who manage your servers. You get my point
I am sure.

This all depends on whether we are able to truly generate huge time savings in
your work day by eliminating the time consuming investigations and
troubleshooting. And thats exactly what we are shooting for!

We also have a promotion right now with a 20% off rate, free upgrade to our
Advanced plan for 2 months, and great prepay and volume discounts. More
pricing information here: <https://www.leansentry.com/Pricing>.

Best, Mike

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mijustin
How would something like this compare to a product like New Relic?

~~~
mvolo
Hi mijustin, founder here.

LeanSentry is somewhat similar to New Relic in that we provide server and
application performance monitoring.

However, we are 100% focused on the Windows Server/IIS/ASP.NET stack (that's
our background), and as a result provide deeper analysis and diagnostics for
those applications.

Best, Mike

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maslam
Go Mike! I really like this product, can't wait to try it out.

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kylered
Good luck guys. Good choices for your UI/UX.

