Show HN: Errorship, use datadog as an error tracker (opens in new tab)

Can you add a little more color commentary? I haven't used datadog, but they seem clear that there's both a logging and metrics (apm) side to their product. Is the logging side neglected somehow?

I see, for example, docs on how to log from Python: https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/python-logging-best-practices...

> If it fails it raises an Exception... If your server is down, my application would crash too

So first off, let me just say that I completely agree. If this were the case, that'd be fucking atrocious and would definitely be a blocker for using it.

But I'm curious how you came to that conclusion.

It took me < 2 minutes of looking at the source code[0] to determine that your claim was incorrect. Not only does it appear to gracefully handle the server being unavailable, the developer literally commented that code explaining that they wanted to ensure users could continue uninterrupted if the errorship server is unavailable.

> We give people the benefit of doubt.

> We only consider people to be not authorized if the backend comes back with an authoritative answer to that effect.

> Else, any errors or any other outcome; we assume authorization is there and also assume they belong to the highest pricing plan: Enterprise

> # failure of errorship should not lead to people been unable to ship exceptions

And it took even less time than that to run a new Python Docker container, install the library, run the sample code, and validate my assumptions[1] (the first attempt fails because the key is invalid, I disabled Internet access for the second attempt and it succeeded).

So I'm legitimately curious - did I miss something? Is there another failure case I didn't catch or test for? Or did you just make an assumption and not bother to verify it? And if it's the latter, why? What was the point? Like, to be frank, if this was a news piece I could understand the (possibly inaccurate) commentary. But why take the time and energy to write your comment and tear down someone's personal project with seemingly inaccurate claims?

(To be clear, no affiliation with errorship, I'm not even a DataDog user. Just a random dev browsing HN).

[0] https://gitlab.com/errorship/errorship_python/-/blob/master/...

[1] https://gist.github.com/citruspi/16d359ac2dafef6fc876e2dd101...

Hi.

> If your server is down, my application would crash too.

The errorship library is written in such a way that it fails open. If our servers are down(or any other failure), it does not affect your application and your application continues to work okay.

IMO only if you are using the Logs functionality. You can log exceptions/errors, and it should be pretty easy to set-up monitoring around these events.

The main benefit is that you do not have to context switch from datadog metrics/logs to go look at your exceptions in sentry.

With errorship, all these are made available in one place; in your datadog account.

You also do not need to maintain two services. If you are already using datadog(maybe their APM and their logging and metrics service) then you might as well use them for error tracking instead of maintaining an additional account with sentry.

However, it is not a must that you give up sentry to use errorship. errorship will work just as fine, if you choose to continue with sentry.

Do you have examples of how that might work with other languages or tools?

This looks like an admittedly clever hack to avoid the fantastically expensive APM and still get some useful exception logging. I really wanted to use Datadog’s APM but $31 per host was too much. The downsides to logging to the event stream like Errorship is that you can’t associate exceptions with requests and aggregation is limited to tags. I think event tags have a low-ish cardinality limit similar to metrics.

Hi. That's a good summary of what errorship does. The pricing [1] page has an faq that touches on the build vs buy question

1. https://errorship.com/pricing.html

> Having to look at the list of all exceptions and figure out which ones are of interest wouldn’t be ideal.

You can filter for exceptions by tags. You can also use full text search to filter for exceptions. ie all the functionality provided[1] by the datadog eventstream[1] is available for your errors.

> Also, nitpick: it’s 2020, maybe update the front page screenshot to Python 3: is this even maintained?

errorship is compatible with both python2 and python3. Yes it is maintained. We have a testsuite that is ran in CI under both python2 and python3. Some of our customers during early trials still had some python2 applications that they had yet to port over.

1. https://docs.datadoghq.com/events/#event-stream