
Ducksboard is joining New Relic - eloycoto
https://ducksboard.com/new-relic-acquisition/
======
wulczer
Obligatory Show HN where we first showed Ducksboard to the world (1301 days
ago):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332464)

Thanks for all the feedback and interest we got from the community through all
those years and just because we now work at New Relic doesn't mean we'll stop
procrastinating on HN!

~~~
swartkrans
congrats, will you still be working from Spain or do you have to relocate?

~~~
wulczer
Thanks!

We're staying in Spain and there are plans to further grow the Barcelona
office.

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ManuelKiessling
New Relic... isn't that the T-Shirt company that is spamming my Twitter feed?

~~~
freehunter
When I saw the name I immediately thought "that's a clothing company right?"

Never used their product, but I see ads for their shirts all the time.

~~~
vhost-
Dude, I work 2 blocks from their location in Portland. I can't go 10 feet
without seeing their t-shirts or hoodies.

~~~
mountaineer
Up until a couple months ago, I used to work a couple blocks away. I remember
the packs of them roaming the streets.

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dfuego
Congrats guys! Great to see a company from Barcelona getting this success.
Inspiration for all Europe.

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nullrouted
I was a duckboards customer and a newrelic customer so this is pretty
interesting. Congrats to both sides on this acquisition. I hope this breaths
new life into ducksboard as it seems they have stagnated quite a bit.

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amiller72
Congrats to the Founders! Though I wonder why New Relic went with Ducksboard
rather than other larger competitors like Gecko or Cyfe.

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domrdy
Congrats! Just wanted to take the chance to say 'thank you' for gridster!

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fasouto
Congrats to the ducks team!! They did an amazing job

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ipedrazas
What it's New Relic???

~~~
Donzo
I use New Relic. They provide, IMHO, fantastic realtime server monitoring
functions. You can tell if the hypervisor is stealing from your allocation,
how many resources you are using, and other useful information. All of this is
displayed on nice looking graphs and such.

They also give you downtime notifications if your server goes offline for more
than a few minutes. Not only is the service free, but they give you a free
T-shirt.

They have application monitoring tools as well, which they are monetizing. I'm
very happy with the product.

What's Ducksboard?

~~~
kawsper
What I don't like about New Relic is their pricing model. I don't like to be
paying for each appserver connected.

We are constantly adding and removing servers based on our traffic, and with
something like New Relic we need to renegotiate or change contract if we
suddenly needs a lot of servers. Pay by metric, pay by request etc. is fairer
in my eyes. If I have 10 servers connnected and send 1 request-per-minute I
still pay for having 10 servers connected.

If they process 1 request from me it shouldn't matter whether or not I have 1
or 10 servers connected, I should only pay for what they process.

The reason I am not using NewRelic personally is that my infrastructure is 5
linodes, which I pay $20 for each server. And with NewRelic Pro I have to pay
$149 per host. I have seen people doing tricks like only enabling NewRelic for
certain hosts just to get around their pricing model.

I really like New Relic, and its very pleasant to use their service, they give
good insight about your application, I just wish I could afford their service.

~~~
ericcholis
I agree, New Relic's pricing model is almost too "enterprise". Per host
pricing seems high, and difficult to scale. It's too bad, because I love
everything else they offer. I'm even considering the new Insights service. I
think they need to introduce a mid-tier pricing level between Free and Pro.

They've got a good foothold in the market as a all-in-one solution. I've
attempted to find a drop-in replacement, without much luck. It's difficult to
find a one-for-one service, but here's some similar services with entry-level
pricing:

DataDog
([https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/](https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/)):
$15/host/month up to 100 hosts.

Scout
([https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions](https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions)):
$10/host/month

CopperEgg ([http://copperegg.com/pricing/](http://copperegg.com/pricing/)): A
la carte depending on service

Stackify
([http://www.stackify.com/pricing/](http://www.stackify.com/pricing/)):
$15/host/month

The biggest feature that I need is application level monitoring for PHP.
There's plenty of great server monitoring tools, but not many services that
track application performance like New Relic does.

I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?

Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative
service.

~~~
ceejayoz
> Per host pricing seems high, and difficult to scale.

This is an understatement. $149/month/host is crazy if you're using anything
other than the largest AWS instances, for example - a c3.large is $16.11/month
with a reservation.

~~~
tkrajcar
But New Relic isn't necessarily designed to be a tool to save you hosting $
(although I suppose it could). What about as a tool to save engineering hours,
and increase conversion rates by reducing error rates and improving
performance? Maybe the "worth it" changes then -- especially when you consider
that we have a Lite product that's absolutely free for unlimited apps,
servers, and request volume -- just limited to 24 hour data retention and
missing some of our more advanced/in-depth features.

I work for New Relic, obviously :)

~~~
ceejayoz
> What about as a tool to save engineering hours, and increase conversion
> rates by reducing error rates and improving performance?

The problem I have with that argument is that the number of hours New Relic
saves me isn't really related to the number of instances I'm running. If I've
got 10 AWS medium instances and I swap them out for 30 AWS micro instances, my
NR cost just tripled but its utility to me likely didn't.

~~~
scalayer
You just need to talk your account rep (or sales if you don't have one). You
will definitely not pay this price. I work for New Relic, so if you need help,
let me know.

~~~
ceejayoz
I really don't like playing "what's the _real_ price" games.

~~~
scalayer
I hear you. It's just a matter of simplicity. We can't have every single
environment configuration on the site. So, we have a few list prices with
links to contact us if your model doesn't fit. I hope that helps. If you have
other questions, let me know.

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kolev
Well, just today I was asked can we do something about our New Relic bill. I
mean, come one, $160/server is too much and the annual contract keeps you
locked in. We should build an open-source APM and press those guys to stop
ganging up togehter with AppDynamics, AppNeta, and the likes and keep the
price high.

~~~
kolev
I'm sure I got downvoted from one of the APM providers - a sane developer
without vested interest will never do that. So, thank you for showing your
true colors, vendors!

~~~
trjordan
So, I didn't downvote you, and I work at AppNeta. In fact, I spent a lot of
time arguing for us to switch from a per-request pricing model to a per-host
model. Reasons we did it:

1) Per-request is unpredictable. Paying 2x because you got a traffic spike and
had to auto-scale sucks. Paying 10x because you got a traffic spike and
handled it without autoscaling sucks more. Getting capped at day 20 in the
month because we didn't want variable pricing sucks the most.

2) Estimating cost is nigh-on impossible. If we charge per metric, quick, what
will it cost per month?

3) The price we picked per host is, to some extent, based on the amount of
data we collect and store. We store every traced request for 90 days, and do
analysis on all of that as it comes it. The AWS bill to pay for all that
analysis and storage isn't trivial.

The dinosaurs of the early 2000s got around this by saying "just pay for the
license, and store it yourself!" And you ended up with customers that had 2
hours of data retention, because storing it all was expensive.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, we're in a different league of data
collection than something like Pingdom. There are serious costs associated
with all that -- we're not colluding to screw you, we promise :)

Edit: Check out Twitter Zipkin and Etsy CrossStitch if you want open-source.
The basic collection tech exists, but it's a pain to run yourself. At least,
that's what we hear from customers.

~~~
kolev
Per-host is also not well-suited for elastic computing. Pricing should be
billed for host-hours instead, if you ask me. I'm familiar with zipkin, but
it's an overkill for most projects; Etsy CrossStitch - although I follow
Etsy's projects, I don't think I've seen it. Anyway, I think I've exchanges
comments with you before in here, but the issue is that you guys have some
large enterprise clients, and usually with companies like yours, pricing
totally gets shifted towards that model. It's really too expensive to pay more
for monitoring (although I greatly value the data), when it exceeds the cost
of the server itself. At least, business people can hardly justify something
with clear costs like hardware (cloud or not) to something without 100% clear
benefit to them (as they don't use it; it's for the developers, who's job
should be to write code that just works and doesn't require all these
expensive babysitting tools, if you see my point). This is not to attack you
or anything, but my experiences across multiple organizations. Worst case (at
least with your competitor New Relic) is that you pay for internal dev servers
as well. Come on, give me a break - how can you compare live with dev servers,
really? This is the abuse that I'm talking about. Maybe it's a different
situation with you, I don't know, but it's really unfair and a frustration for
us.

