docker VS self-hosted

And as for the installation, there is a docker compose setting that perists the data, alternatively there is the possibility to install everything "natively"

> I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it.

Reminds me of Sentry: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/

This is their example docker-compose for self-hosting: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

It has:

  - exim4 (smtp)

> What should people use?

I recall Apache Skywalking being pretty good, especially for smaller/medium scale projects: https://skywalking.apache.org/

The architecture is simple, the performance is adequate, it doesn't make you spend days configuring it and it even supports various different data stores: https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/main/v9.0.0/en/setup/back...

The problems with it are that it isn't super popular (although has agents for most popular stacks), the docs could be slightly better and I recall them also working on a new UI so there is a little bit of churn: https://skywalking.apache.org/downloads/

Still better versus some of the other options when you need something that just works instead of spending a lot of time configuring something (even when that something might be superior in regards to the features): https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

Sentry is just the first thing that comes to mind (OpenTelemetry also isn't simpler due to how much it tries to do), but compare its complexity to Skywalking: https://github.com/apache/skywalking/blob/master/docker/dock...

I wish there was more self-hosted software like that out there, enough to address certain concerns in a simple way on day 1 and leave branching out to more complex options like OpenTelemetry once you have a separate team for that and the cash is rolling in.

Sounds interesting!

Will you compare with qryn? Self-hosted sentry?

qryn.metrico.in/

https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/

yes to the second https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/23.4.0/docker-... and only after the embargo is over to the first: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/23.4.0/LICENSE...

I also miss the "good old days" when running sentry was like 3 containers, not the 32 of modern Sentry

We use the self-hosted Sentry application landscape to set up the actual APM or SPM. We'll only explore a small set of features supported by Sentry to preserve the focus of this post. Refer to the documentation for more details.

> E.g does not allow you to define custom metrics to e.g. monitor resource utilization

I think that might not quite be the case in the latest versions: https://docs.sentry.io/product/performance/metrics/#custom-p...

> In addition to the automatic performance metrics described above, Sentry supports setting custom performance metrics on transactions. Custom performance metrics allow you to define metrics (beyond the ones mentioned above) that are important to your application and send them to Sentry.

> For example, you might want to set a custom metric to track:

> - Total memory usage during a transaction

> - The amount of time being queried

> - Number of times a user performed an action during a transaction

> You define and configure custom metrics in the SDK.

Though for my use cases, Sentry's technical complexity is more of a stumbling block, were I to self-host it: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

Considering you would rather be without third-party, I would suggest Sentry which is open-source and allows for a self-hosted solution https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/. It works similar to Honeybadger, but you can control everything yourself.

Technically, you can also use Skywalking for log aggregation, but personally the setup isn't as great and their log view UI is a bit awkward (e.g. it's not easy to preview all logs for a particular service/instance in a file-like view), see the demo: https://skywalking.apache.org/

For logs in particular, Graylog feels reasonably sane, since it has a similarly "manageable" amount of components, for a configuration example see: https://docs.graylog.org/docs/docker#settings

Contrast that to some of the more popular solutions out there, like Sentry, which gets way more complicated really quickly: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

For most of the people who have to deal with self-hosted setups where you might benefit from something like tracing or log shipping, actually getting the platform up and running will be an uphill battle, especially if not everyone sees the value in setting something like this up, or setting aside enough resources for it. Sometimes people will be more okay with having no idea why a system goes down randomly, rather than administering something like this constantly and learning new approaches, instead of just rotating a bunch of files.

For others, there are no such worries, because they can open their wallets (without worrying about certain regulations and where their data can be stored, hopefully) and have some cloud provider give them a workable solution, so they just need to integrate their apps with some agent for shipping the information.

For others yet, throwing the requirement over to some other team who's supposed to provide such platform components for them is also a possibility.