Alternatives to OpsGenie

Our primary source of monitoring and alerting is Datadog. We’ve got prebuilt dashboards for every scenario and integration with PagerDuty to manage routing any alerts. We’ve definitely scaled past the point where managing dashboards is easy, but we haven’t had time to invest in using features like Anomaly Detection. We’ve started using Honeycomb for some targeted debugging of complex production issues and we are liking what we’ve seen. We capture any unhandled exceptions with Rollbar and, if we realize one will keep happening, we quickly convert the metrics to point back to Datadog, to keep Rollbar as clean as possible.

We use Segment to consolidate all of our trackers, the most important of which goes to Amplitude to analyze user patterns. However, if we need a more consolidated view, we push all of our data to our own data warehouse running PostgreSQL; this is available for analytics and dashboard creation through Looker.

Data science and engineering teams at Lyft maintain several big data pipelines that serve as the foundation for various types of analysis throughout the business.

Apache Airflow sits at the center of this big data infrastructure, allowing users to “programmatically author, schedule, and monitor data pipelines.” Airflow is an open source tool, and “Lyft is the very first Airflow adopter in production since the project was open sourced around three years ago.”

There are several key components of the architecture. A web UI allows users to view the status of their queries, along with an audit trail of any modifications the query. A metadata database stores things like job status and task instance status. A multi-process scheduler handles job requests, and triggers the executor to execute those tasks.

Airflow supports several executors, though Lyft uses CeleryExecutor to scale task execution in production. Airflow is deployed to three Amazon Auto Scaling Groups, with each associated with a celery queue.

Audit logs supplied to the web UI are powered by the existing Airflow audit logs as well as Flask signal.

Datadog, Statsd, Grafana, and PagerDuty are all used to monitor the Airflow system.

For my portfolio websites and my personal OpenSource projects I had started exclusively using React and JavaScript so I needed a way to track any errors that we're happening for my users that I didn't uncover during my personal UAT.

I had narrowed it down to two tools LogRocket and Sentry (I also tried Bugsnag but it did not make the final two). Before I get into this I want to say that both of these tools are amazing and whichever you choose will suit your needs well.

I firstly decided to go with LogRocket the fact that they had a recorded screen capture of what the user was doing when the bug happened was amazing... I could go back and rewatch what the user did to replicate that error, this was fantastic. It was also very easy to setup and get going. They had options for React and Redux.js so you can track all your Redux.js actions. I had a fairly large Redux.js store, this was ended up being a issue, it killed the processing power on my machine, Chrome ended up using 2-4gb of ram, so I quickly disabled the Redux.js option.

After using LogRocket for a month or so I decided to switch to Sentry. I noticed that Sentry was openSorce and everyone was talking about Sentry so I thought I may as well give it a test drive. Setting it up was so easy, I had everything up and running within seconds. It also gives you the option to wrap an errorBoundry in React so get more specific errors. The simplicity of Sentry was a breath of fresh air, it allowed me find the bug that was shown to the user and fix that very simply. The UI for Sentry is beautiful and just really clean to look at, and their emails are also just perfect.

I have decided to stick with Sentry for the long run, I tested pretty much all the JS error loggers and I find Sentry the best.

I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.