Show HN: OpenStatus – Open-source monitoring with incident managements

[tibozaurus]

Hey HN!

We’re Max and Thibault building OpenStatus.dev an OpenSource synthetic monitoring platform with incident managements

1 min demo: https://twitter.com/mxkaske/status/1685666982786404352

We have just reached 2000 stars on GitHub

https://github.com/openstatusHQ/openstatus

We are really excited to hear your feedback/questions and connect further: our emails are [email protected] and [email protected].

Thank you!

[kc10]

Congrats on the launch!!

I am previously the founder of a synthetic monitoring startup, devraven.io.

Just sharing my experience - monitoring is brutally competitive. From my conversations most large enterprises have very little synthetic monitoring, they use DDOG or other APM tools and do not want to try any new tools for few thousand dollar savings. And in a lot of cases they are comfortable with their custom test frameworks that use Selenium. Some are even worried that setting up synthetic monitoring will bring down their environment or trash their database with junk data ::sigh::

Most smaller companies we spoke to are not mature enough to have monitoring and did not have resources who can setup monitoring. They used to ask us for help to build tests for them. Asks for discounts on $29.99/mo price point were not uncommon.

After few months of operating the product, we did find few angels who were interested in investing in us (not the product). But in the end, we did not feel that we can make good use of investor money and provide a decent return to them, so we ended up backing out of the investment and chose to shutdown the product.

[CAP_NET_ADMIN]

In what ways is it better than Uptime Kuma which doesn't require a bunch of SaaS spaghetti to run and has much broader community support.

[1] https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

[gettodachoppa]

As a power user (not professional sysadmin) I love Uptime Kuma. A simple docker image that uses 110MB RAM and gave me all the monitoring I need for my home lab and my cloud VPS. Very easy to use too, lovely UI.

[oooyay]

First, congrats on the launch!

Why did you end up going with a SaaS model? 30 Euros or $31.50 USD is pretty expensive for something like a status site. You'd have a lot less to manage day to day and be able to focus more on innovating the product if you just sold the software, imo.

Why the focus on synthetic monitoring? As a SRE, I actively eschew synthetic monitoring. It's highly error prone and doesn't actually indicate regional availability. I'd like a status site that I could push a certain internally derived SLA for a given service to and the status site reflects the average over time of that windowed SLA.

SLA's are intended to incur customer refunds when they're violated if they're meaningful. If your synthetic monitoring shows an SLA of 4 nines but it was actually closer to 4.8 or 4.9 then you could be on the hook for causing your customers a good bit of legal pain. Just something to think about in this space.

Other status sites don't build external SLAs off of internal metrics because the process of deriving internal metrics that align with external outcomes is sufficiently difficult. Instead, they calculate an SLA based off of posted statuses over a period of time eg: Degraded, Down, Up. Supporting both modes could be a boon to potential customers.

Overall looks like a great start; good luck on your venture!

[lucgagan]

> Why the focus on synthetic monitoring? As a SRE, I actively eschew synthetic monitoring. It's highly error prone and doesn't actually indicate regional availability. I'd like a status site that I could push a certain internally derived SLA for a given service to and the status site reflects the average over time of that windowed SLA.

As an end user, hard disagree.

GitHub is a great example of this. Their status almost always shows 100% uptime while the service is entirely unstable.

It is clear that their uptime SLAs do not align with end user experience.

As an end user, I care whether I can access and use the service. I don't care what broke in between.

[101008]

I don't know much about statuses pages, I just check them to see if the services I use are having an issue. It's the first time I read about "synthetic monitoring", and from a quick Google search, it seems to referring to "automatic monitoring". A bsic versino of this would be to do a ping to see if the server is responding, or a HTTP request to see if it's returning a 200 status code.

However, if I read your comment carefully, you are suggesting to provide an alternative where the company (owner) could decide manually when a system is down or up. If that's the case, wouldn't the status page be just a page template where someone logs into a panel and toggle a button to say "down" or "up" and post updates? If there is no automatic monitoring, the service would look more like a blog/tumblr/twitter than anything else.

Or probably I am missing something because of my lack of experience and I am curious, I'd like to know!

[tibozaurus]

Thanks again !

Tbh we haven't thought of the sla violation

For region availability we are planing to add multi region check per Monitor

At the moment you can only set one region per monitor

[paulddraper]

> Why did you end up going with a SaaS model?

Convenience.

More companies want Datadog,etc than to manage Datadog,etc.

[impulser_]

Why is it normal in the Typescript community to rely on a lot of other SaaS providers to build a simple application?

This project relies on 4 different paid services. Why?

Why do you need a SaaS to handle your auth, mailing, database, and logging?

Aren't there libraries for these things in Typescript? Why pay for them?

[ies7]

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion/experience. Not all people/startup do this.

In 2018-2020 my company (an FMCG company) asked me to temporarily lead the IT & product team of 2 startups that they invest (as a majority) a few years before. One is a telemedicine and the other is an e-commerce.

Both of them have almost all of their auth, db, etc using other unrecognized newly startup SaaS.

After a few meeting I realized that these startups is "guided" by the VC to use other startups service that the VC invest and in return the other startups will(must) use our service (telemedicine) for their employee.

So all of these startup companies can claim the monthly active users and companies that use their products, we also get the topline revenue and then those numbers will be included in a pitch-deck for the next round of investment.

To top that, for the telemedicine I also got a KPI to hire 200 programmers so we can also include that number in the pitch-deck. In 2 years, I got 3 talented one and less than 30 that can code fizz buzz or simple CRUD (with their language of choice).

[cchance]

Not the dev but i know for me it mostly comes down to not reinventing the wheel, and it allows for a lot easier ability to scale while also allowing for free operation as well for indies.

Turso: Has insanely large free level and means no need to run your own DB(though you can run your own sqlite locally), their free tier even just got drastically expanded.

Clerk: 5000 free users, not having to deal with your own authentication.

Resend: Avoids dealing and managing mail, and dealing with spam filtering etc, i dont know if they allow just using an internal smtp, but seems ok given 3,000 mails per month.

Tinybird, i don't know enough about but also has a free plan...

So mostly i'd imagine most of these aren't about paying for third party platforms, its about offloading tasks you don't want to worry about implementing yourself, and that also give you the ability to scale outside of the small initial deployment for cost.

[lucideer]

> Why do you need a SaaS to handle your auth, mailing, database, and logging?

There's absolutely no reason to require SaaS to handle database & logging, but:

1. For mail, in 2023, it's a defacto requirement, for any app. Sure you can do it yourself, but handling spam filters will be a challenge. Defaulting to SaaS on this is extremely defensible.

2. For auth, in 2023, rolling your own auth that is secure & offers decent MFA is a similarly daunting task. Would it be nice if they offered an optional local auth backend, maybe. Would it be nicer if they offered a choice of multiple SaaS backends, definitely. But it's ultimately pretty defensible.

3. It seems to me the DB can be local sqlite / libsqld (looks primarily aimed at dev envs but at least it's an option).

---

On aggregate though you're right, this does seem excessively SaaS-y.

[josevalerio]

https://x.com/bholmesdev/status/1704846748441534627?s=46

[nodesocket]

I run Uptime Kuma[1] in my home to monitor all my homelab and Kubernetes services. It's really awesome. How does OpenStatus compare to it?

[1] https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

[jaxn]

I had just been looking at open source status pages this morning, and this was not in the list I was looking at.

OP, you might want to d a PR here: https://github.com/ivbeg/awesome-status-pages

Everyone else might be interested in that list of similar projects.

[tibozaurus]

We are already in it :)

[donavanm]

Hey Max & Thibault, interesting approach. It seems like you're going for after a specific feature and (unintentionally?) pulling in some product areas that are very hard businesses. I believe youre reusing existing saas and framework tools to make your effort more effective, but may be asking your customers to adopt new dependencies as well.

I think your core offering is around status tracking and stakeholder notification. However you're also pulling in Monitoring/APM by running your own status checks, for example. I would expect any paying customer to already have monitoring and alerting of some type; New Relic, DataDog, Amazon Cloudwatch Synthetics, etc. Wouldnt your customers want to use their own existing metrics for SLOs, or existing alarms & alerts for incident detection? Similarly it seems like youre implementing alerting/engagement as well. Are you asking your customers to reimplement their PagerDuty/OpsGenie/VictorOps configuration? There's a lot of organisational inertia around business processes that define alerting & engagement. I haven't looked at userbase numbers in a long time but I would guess the vast majority of your target customers are using one of those three already.

If I was to guess initial adoption would be aided by "ease of use", particularly integration with the customers existing tools & process. Then differentiation and value is based on what those existing monitoring/alerting tools cant do, eg alternative data sources (APM vs RUM), automated/predefined response, approval processes, customized visibility & communication per client, etc.

disclosure: Principal at AWS. Comments are my own personal opinion, based on public information only.

[jacooper]

Looks good, however i find the pricing a bit on the high side, especially compared to others like uptime robot and hettrix tools.

[tibozaurus]

Yep but we are on the same pricing range as BetterStack or Checkly based on the number of request we make per month month

[snowstormsun]

10 minute intervals and only 5 monitors is very limited for the hobby plan. Why shouldn't I use UptimeRobot (or any other alternative) instead which has 5 minute intervals and also only one status page for free?

[iimblack]

For me uptime robot has been very buggy and unreliable so I’m looking for alternatives. Parts of the dashboard break often. Maintenance windows not respected. Alerts just not working at all when a real outage happens.

[throwawake]

Not to downplay the product which is awesome, but how common it is for a single logo to be used by multiple commericial entities ?

For example, this one seems to be from https://creativemarket.com/Mujigraphic/27123272-Logo-S-desig...

[tibozaurus]

What i dont get is why creative market make you pay for the logo when it was originally taken from the logo book

http://www.logobook.com/logo/sparkasse-berlin/

the logobook is the goldmine for any logo :)

[wicktron]

Speaking of status pages, are there any that exist that can aggregate the status pages of various SaaS apps?

Meaning - Let's say I'm a company that subscribes to many SaaS apps (ie: Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, etc.), but want to create an internal dashboard to monitor those SaaS apps and alert my internal users. What options are available?

[vladvasiliu]

I've built my own that can read statspage.io based status pages and export them as prometheus metrics. Grafana then shows me the general status.

https://github.com/vladvasiliu/statuspage-exporter

[messutied]

Founder of StatusPal here. Our status pages can do this :)

We support configuring SaaS dependencies as part of your status page and alert your team members: https://www.statuspal.io/features/status-page

Alternatively, you can try our free Slack app, where you can do similar directly in Slack: https://statuspal.io/status-center/slack/

[dandrew5]

Check out https://statusvista.com/ - it has lots of SaaS apps

[ebcase]

Have a look at https://metrist.io/

(I’ve been meaning to try it out but haven’t yet.)

[tnolet]

Checkly founder / CTO here. Got a ping we got mentioned. Good luck to the OP!

Checkly started bootstrapped (not open source) and it’s indeed a tough market. Very exciting also, but not super easy to get a foothold.

Anyway! Good luck again and will be following your efforts.

[deadlast2]

On your homepage https://www.openstatus.dev/ the Star on Github button shows 0. I think it should show the actual count 2.3k.

[tiberriver256]

The site looks visually very good. Lots of typos in your English translations though.

[bluehatbrit]

Congrats on your launch! It seems well designed and well thought though from a UX perspective. The landing page is also very simple and easy to wrap my head around.

I'd be tempted to use this for a small side project, but I'm not sure it has a huge draw when getting to the paid tiers. There are plenty of competitors out there and this doesn't seem to have a niche that this serves any better than them. Open source is great but I'm not sure it's a strong differentiator in this case.

I'd probably compare this to something like Plausible Analytics. They lean heavily into privacy-friendly, and easy GDPR/CCPA/PECR compliance. It being open source is what gives you confidence to use it, knowing that if the small business did disappear you can continue using the product on your own infra for as long as you want. OpenStatus seems to be trying to lean on the fact it's open source, but if their SaaS business failed it would be trivial to move to a competitor without much consideration. It's not delivering anything different, and it's not baking itself into my app or infrastructure, so moving is the case of setting up with a competitor and moving a subdomain.

I really hope you're able to make it work and get profitable though. Having high quality open source options is really fantastic, I just think it's going to take more to cement a place in the market.

[todotask]

I see that this was written with Hono web framework, one of an interesting idea for OpenStatus.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Maybe it's just me, but seeing pricing on the first page of an open source project makes me puke a little in my mouth. I know that technically the code is open source and people need to eat and all that, yet, I can't help it but feel a little bit scammed.

[mrfynd]

congrats on the launch! product looks cool. just one thing though: the dots make it difficult to focus on the design or read text. or is it just me?

[octagons]

I'd recommend working on editing any public-facing copy and unifying your message. I'm assuming I know what this tool does, but these examples do not validate that assumption. Is it a platform or a service? In 3 different locations, OpenStatus is listed as the "open source monitoring XYZ with...": "on-call managements", "Incident Management", and "beautiful status page".

Examples copied from the landing page and front page of the GH repo.

> Open-source monitoring service

> OpenStatus is an open source monitoring services with on-call managements.

> The Open-Source Synthetic Monitoring Platform with Incident Management

> OpenStatus is open-source synthetic monitoring platform with beautiful status page.

> The open-source monitoring platform

[tibozaurus]

Thank for the feedback

Tbh we have struggled to find the perfect messaging in the last month

But we will take it into account thanks again

[jmartens]

Pings don’t seem like enough info

[sass_is_retro]

And yet we all get by just fine with pings!