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Chris Sotherden

Chris Sotherden

@csotherden

Software architect, engineering leader, solver of problems, builder of things.

Have you had any incidents where this didn't detect a customer impacting issue?

Nice! Is there anything that the combination of Bugsnag, Uptime Robot, and Blazer doesn't provide you that you wish you had? Would you rather have a single solution, or do you prefer the multi tool approach?

Multi-tool approach works, because everything is best-in-class. Having everything in one tool sounds good, but I'm not sure it would be able to compete with the individual tools.

There's currently two things I miss from these tools:

  1. App performance analysis. There are plenty of tool that provide this, but they tend to be around $99 per month which is a lot of money for something I tend to use occasionally. My use case would be to occasionally analyse and improve performance, rather than track continuously.

  2. Logging. I haven't found a good and affordable tool for this yet. Again, this is something I wouldn't use a lot, until I need to track down a specific issue.

In both these cases added them on-demand isn't great, because it takes some time to get data. But leaving them always running isn't great either as they are quite costly and I don't use them much.

I'd prefer a model where you can always save the data, but only pay when you want to access it.

How well is this working for you? Is there anything that this solution doesn't provide you that you wish you had?

It's good (I think). I started my promotion rodeo and really should have hooked up Rebrandly to Google Sheets or Airtable via Zapier. For some reason, I didn't do it before launch and kinda stuck with analytics in Rebrandly. I guess it's an easy fix with an export! I haven't really ventured out for more sophisticated analytics but I suppose that heat maps and drop off rates are important thing to know later on? Not sure how valuable that is.

What are you using to detect issues to trigger the Slack notifications? Or is it just coded directly into your applications/site?

Hard coded. I use golang so I need to deal with errors anyways, so I have a function sends them to me

I really like this idea of basically developing premium case studies directly out of your consulting clients. I think it works out to be a great mix of marketing (both your consultancy, and the businesses hiring you) and content development all in one.

I actually like the third one the most personally. I think it's the simplicity that speaks to me most.