Stackify

Stackify does pretty much everything which you would expect from a new relic competitor, but where it excels is in the logging. It allows your to push your IIS logs as well as integrated application logging, so then when something goes wrong you get a full picture of what was going on.

Their support is also second to none!

My team is almost exclusively developers, not system admins, and we're small to boot. Getting developers to think about customer satisfaction metrics is hard enough without asking them to also think about server up-time, memory allocation, and holistic performance. Stackify makes that so much easier. Now we can see exactly what endpoints are causing the most problems and dissatisfaction (application performance) as well as see the server and all our apps with a total view. We're not even using all the benefits offered yet and it's totally changed our view of our environment.

About a year and a half ago, I was introduced to New Relic. As a startup developer, I needed insight into my app's performance in real-time. It was good, but over a few months, I noticed some issues that led me to believe New Relic was actually hindering the performance of my app. Then, they changed their pricing structure, and really priced themselves out of the stack.

Right around that same time, I was introduced to Stackify (I think I saw a banner ad on a social media site or something like that). I clicked. First stop: Pricing. It was a third of what New Relic was charging. OK. Cool. Then, features.

This is where Stackify shines. The APM+ is worth its weight in gold. Line-level performance metrics. It takes a little bit of configuring, but when I can look at specific lines in a production environment for performance tweaks... Nice.

Add errors and logs. I'm a little south of $70 a month - which is not an easy pill to swallow for a start-up. But, compared to the alternative...

I wish it had a few more configuration options - like to be able to set performance thresholds. I've written a data warehouse, and to see longer page loads is normal. My APM+ scores go in the tank when lots of data is served. I wish there was a way to configure that.

Is it perfect? No. Is it good? Yes. Very good? Yes.

After shopping around with several of the other APM providers out there for a new app that my company is hosting in AWS, we were very pleased to find Stackify. Unlike so many competitors, it is easy to understand exactly how to configure and use Stackify to monitor our application. In the evaluation, the Stackify team was happy to provide multiple demos to all of our project's stakeholders, and is always very responsive when we have a question. Within minutes of setting up a trial account, I was able to have servers reporting data back to Stackify, and could view a dashboard illustrating the availability of our app. I was even able to script the installation of Stackify for our AWS templates, so every machine that we bring up is automagically added to the Stackify dashboard and grouped into the pool of other servers that are part of a given application. In addition to this feature set and outstanding customer service, the pricing options for Stackify are awesome. All of their pricing options are affordable for even a small application, and they are one of only a few vendors who has truly designed their pricing model for the cloud, so we don't get stuck paying a ton of extra money licenses strictly designed for physical servers. In a market where some APM vendors' estimates could easily top your whole AWS bill, Stackify is a very attractive option. Give these guys a try!

My organization has recently embraced DevOps as an organizational philosophy and we have been searching for a tool that combines server monitoring, application insights, exception logging, and log management into one place. We previously used 3 different tools in our environment, with the development team using one set of tools, and the operations staff using another. After implementing Stackify in our environment, we have been able to use one tool for all of the above.

It has already proved useful in troubleshooting seemingly random application behaviors, and having access to alarms in Slack ensures the entire team is aware of what's going on. My development team has found the exception logging framework very simple to implement in our applications and has changed policy to log exceptions to stackify by default. We particularly enjoy being able to correlate errors to other logs and to current performance.

[Edited by brianwahoff, July 02]

We were using New Relic, but it wasn't providing us the info we wanted and it was so expensive that we couldn't afford having it on all prod servers. I've switched to Stackify and I'm using it on a .net , Azure based webapp, the app is with high traffic subscription service, and solid services is essential. In one case we were using Stackify to identify an issue that made the site slow occasionally, it was very hard to pin point the source of the problem. Once installed it was a very fast process and we identified the combination of issues that lead to this behavior. Having the log and error data as part of the detailed trace was tremendous help. And seeing all the logs recorded when an exception was thrown is a cool little feature. Personally I can watch their real-time tailing all day long.

Stackify has been a really nice find for us this year. Our team was puzzled as to why it was so hard to find a service that would offer centralised logging without charging $$$1000's !! Stackify put an end to our search.

What we love about the service is it makes searching for logs so much simpler. All our servers logs can be searched from the one place without having to SSH into each one individually and try and dig through files and folders. Stackify even allows us to use tail for a live-stream! Not to mention the added peace of mind of being able to give users access to a Stackify account instead of root access to a server where simple mistakes could lead to a catastrophe.

Currently we don't have much use for the monitoring side of things yet as we've been using NewRelic for a while for that purpose. However, that may change soon. We will definitely be staying with Stackify due to a straightforward User Interface plus not to mention very approachable and helpful staff backing Stackify.

Stackify definitely allows for our flexibility in the future and to potentially save money. It would make sense for us to stop paying for two different services and move to all-in-one monitoring, errors and logs with Stackify.

[Edited by Andy11111, March 26]