Performance (APM) for developers. All insights, one platform
4.3/5 (74 reviews)
I am using Stackify to monitor a multi-tier application in AWS, and was amazed at how easy it was to immediately get all of the servers reporting data on the app with no extra configuration. Our development team has been equally pleased with how simple it has been to have the application's logs fed right to Stackify and accessible from a single dashboard for our product support team. On top of that, the communication from the company has been outstanding. Even though our app is small, they have given us all the attention in the world. The team at Stackify has even provided multiple conference calls demoing their solution to different players in our company throughout the development cycle. And not a single bit of communication we received from Stackify during our evaluation was sales-focused - they really wanted to make sure that we knew exactly what we would be getting. After initially evaluating a competitor whose products seemed overly confusing and whose costs would have exceeded our total AWS bill, Stackify was an easy choice.
Pros
Very easy to use - doesn't get in the way of development with a steep learning curve.
Awesome, accessible support team always at the ready, which was especially nice when we started using more of the advanced features of AWS. For example, when we were talking about writing scripts to help automate parts of our environment, they sent over some scripts to take care of automatically installing Stackify within the hour, saving me a lot of time and research. As a newbie to AWS and the cloud, this saved hours of work.
Cons
Honestly, we haven't experienced a single drawback is using Stackify as an APM provider.
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Rating breakdown
My overall experience with the Stackify Retrace is quite satisfying. I can easily afford the software for the great features it is offering. I can develop applications more efficiently and effectively. It is easy to use. I will recommend it to all the programmers or app developers out there.
Pros
Stackify Retrace is an excellent application monitoring and bug fixing solution. I love the bug management system of the Retrace. It is also highly effective and efficient in fixing them. It can easily monitor in real-time how the app is working and the exact intervals at which the features of the app didn't work correctly or when the app crashed. It keeps all the logs of the app so that, it will be easier to detect and fix the failures. I found it very useful while developing .net applications. The dashboard is one of the main highlights. You can quickly get all the details like error logs, crash report, etc. in only one place.
Cons
Customer response staff is very supportive and helps you to figure out your issues. But, on an incident, I got a very late response from them. I think it MUST be improved. Moreover, I find the log filtering a little tricky. Many a times, the log parameters which I don't want to see in the report were also there. It makes the analyzing process slow.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Initial impressions were great, we installed it on our staging and then production web servers. It provided an interesting look into the actual site performance without all the server noise. After some time both environments had sites that exhibited issues with the stackify agent. High page load times, timeouts, and general app instability was seen on some, but not all web apps on the server. These issues seemingly appeared out of no-where so perhaps it was an auto-update but we couldn't spend the time troubleshooting. The only quick solution was remove the stackify software from those servers. The uninstall did not clean up after itself and left header information from stackify on all sites and all files seemed to remain in the installation directory. Tech support supplied incorrect remediation information for the header information issue and it caused the server downtime while the VM snapshot was reverted. Googling turned up the correct way of removing their changes. Overall I'd say the beneficial insights gained into the app performance provided by the service were negated by the downtime and headaches created by the agent. Also we lost quite a bit of trust by the dev team in our efforts to provide them a stable platform for their applications. When ever there is an issue now the first question is, "Is Stackify still on that server?"
Rating breakdown
Our product management and testing has become more easy with the use of Retrace, kudos team !
Pros
We really loved their centralized logging feature, Stackify helps us more to find bugs on the system and to take proper measures in time. The main interesting feature we noted is that we can run tests and Stackify will revert back with the accurate results, also a proper monitoring on the stack can be done using Retrace. The major advantage is that one can do all the needful activities like code profiling, monitoring and logging on the single system. We dont need to depend on any other third parties for the same.
Cons
The code deployment system has lot of issues as it takes time to integrate onto to their system and the deployment takes lot of time. Rectify this issue and you will have a great tool and platform.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Stackify gives peace of mind when it becomes extremely hard to find bugs. Just go for logs and you get to exact point where the application stalled. It gives alot information about the application. It is one of many tools that .net developer must have.
Pros
It gives in depth knowledge of what all is happening with our application. .net developer finds it very supportive in daily tasks. After one time setup it quiet easy to use. We debug with the help of log monitoring techniques given by Stackify.
Cons
Filtering logs is not as easy with Stackify. We end up searching through many logs unwantedly sometimes. But it gives Stackify power to find everything which is also good sometimes.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Our pricing is based on trace and log usage. Get an estimate of the monthly cost of Retrace APM at https://stackify.com/pricing/#price_estimator
Stackify is an all-in-one app monitoring solution that offers software developers, operations and support managers an innovative cloud-based platform that allows them to monitor and troubleshoot their applications more efficiently. Stackify lets businesses achieve complete visibility around application monitoring, which affords them the ability to easily detect and resolve application problems before they spiral into full-blown customer experience nightmares.
Unlike other solutions that focus on just one or two monitoring and troubleshooting functionalities, hence, incomplete information, Stackify combines monitoring, errors, logs, metrics, secure application visibility or insight in a single platform, connecting the dots to provide developers with a holistic view and understanding of how data are linked across multiple sources, allowing for a more comprehensive insight into the app’s overall health, and faster and more proactive monitoring, diagnostic and issue resolution.
Some of Stackify’s main features include all-in-one monitoring, contextual cross-server metrics, custom metrics, centralized app-centric dashboards, and optional read-only access.
A single but multifunctional app monitoring and troubleshooting platform, Stackify assists users in identifying the answers to three questions: Why is my application down? Why is it slow? Why isn’t it functioning as expected? It provides developers a ton of useful and relevant information, such as application performance and metrics, errors and logs, user satisfaction insights, page load times, and database query speeds. Error rates are categorized by app and environment, and Stackify provides high-level monitoring even for very complex app deployments. It supports cloud, VMs (virtual machines), and on-premise applications based on either Microsoft technology or Linux.
The solution allows the development team or anybody supporting an app to more proactively monitor their applications, as it offers deeper visibility into actual behavior within the application, ensuring good performance doesn’t mask an unhealthy app. Stackify’s Smart Error and Log Management (SmartELM) feature allows developers to easily find application issues using enhanced error reports and the log analysis tool, which aggregates all errors found across all servers, making it easier for developers to understand what’s happening, reproduce the issue, and fix it.
Aside from a broad spectrum of app monitoring features, Stackify offers a rich set of smart notification capabilities that directly point developers and first responders to the error information coming out of the app, such as who the user was or which server the error happened on, effectively shutting out the noise generated by too much logs and repetitive errors by reporting only the information developers care about, without the added time and effort. With Stackify, you get enhanced SMS or email alerts whenever new errors occur or error rates surpass acceptable thresholds.
Created for companies of any size with web-based applications that work on either on-premise or cloud-based servers, Stackify’s target users include software developers or architects, and people involved in application support from the development, operations, IT or DevOps sides.
Some of Stackify’s customers include Ticket Solutions, VeriShip, ABPathfinder and SWAAS.
There are various tools in the market that allow app developers and software engineers to monitor the overall health of their applications and identify the reasons behind application downtime, sluggishness, or when an application isn’t functioning as designed. The downside to using multiple tools, it can become extremely difficult to put the pieces together, as the root cause of the problem needs to be spotted from data across multiple servers, tools and environments. Difficulty means extra time and effort for developers to expend, both being finite resources that can’t be taken for granted, particularly if you intend to promptly resolve issues and provide optimal user experience.
An integrated application monitoring solution in one platform, Stackify provides application metrics, errors and logs vital for the DevOps team to achieve full application performance visibility. Cloud-based, installation is completed within minutes, and out-of-the-box defaults, which are based on industry best practices, can get you started monitoring and troubleshooting your servers and applications immediately.
With Stackify, error tracking and reporting is done across all your servers and applications, allowing you to easily detect problems and behavior deviations unknown to you before, helping you identify the root causes of failures without the need to check multiple log files. Error trends are viewed across all applications and environments, and Stackify provides contextual information that connects the error or exception to all the log statements that led up to it, recorded at the time the error was reported.
A replay of the important event that triggered the app failure is logged, providing the why behind the what, where and when it happened, essentially. Stackify’s error telemetry depicts all errors for each app and server across the entire install base, which can then be filtered according to specific time, app or environment. Stackify also supports error deduplication, which gives you the ability to see the full list of errors across multiple servers and environments without getting inundated with the same errors over and over. The software also allows developers to save log and error searches into new proactive monitors.
The system can be installed either by using the SmartELM API or by using appenders for Log4net, NLog, ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers), Log4j or Logback.
Every application is unique, and there’s no cookie-cutter solution to effectively measure every key software health metric and performance indicator. Stackify enables users to create and monitor custom metrics by adding a few lines of code to the app. Stackify APIs (application program interfaces), such as the Custom Application Metrics API for .NET and Java, allow developers to configure alert notifications, and track error rates tailored to an application’s individual KPIs (key performance indicators), examples being average transaction execution time, number of orders per minute, and the like.
A single platform for monitoring, diagnostics, and log management and aggregation, Stackify offers an integrated dashboard that gives users a broad and comprehensive picture of the overall health of their applications. It amplifies vital insights for DevOps and support teams that then empower them to quickly isolate and unravel performance issues negatively affecting user experience.
Problems are easier to troubleshoot when aggregated in a single monitoring platform, as opposed to checking multiple disparate solutions. With application and resource health, user experience insights, errors and logs, custom application metrics, and application performance visibility all under a single pane of glass across all apps, servers, and environments, the effectiveness of each piece of data is magnified.
When an app crashes, developers need to look into data across the entire application stack (web server, app server, storage and database) to identify the root cause of a problem. While some companies give developers liberal access to their servers, which can become a security risk later on, some provide absolutely no access, which makes app support a jump-through-hoops act for developers.
Stackify offers IT and developers an optional and secure, read-only access to servers where the application resides, so that they’re no longer dependent on the operations team for the application data and information they need to pinpoint and swiftly resolve issues, without creating any damage or changes to the software. Server security isn’t compromised, as permissions are driven using role-based access controls. Once logged in, developers are allowed to browse the permitted server directories and file systems, and go to the dashboard to view which processes are running – much like logging in to a remote desktop but without the risk.
Stackify can be used with both Microsoft and Linux-based applications. .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, Node.js, and PHP applications are supported as well. Many common error and log frameworks work with Stackify, and a REST API is supported for various integration capabilities.
Stackify’s pricing scheme is calculated based on actual consumption. Meaning, users aren’t required to pay a full month on a server that ran for just two days or a few hours. For monitoring, price is at $0.02 per hour, which is roughly $15 per month. For the smart error and log management piece (SmartELM), users are charged $20 for 10GB of errors and log data, and an additional $2 for every succeeding 1GB of data.
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