I can find out what’s wrong within a few seconds.
In my experience alerting often came down to some departments trying to push some shit to some other departments. I personally avoid working in monitoring/alerting for that reason, it's just human problems and dysfunctional organizations, nothing any tool can help with.
It's crazy how easy it was to setup and cover all our infra (AWS, ELB, postgresql, cassandra, kafka, haproxy, nginx, etc...). The tool paid for itself with the infra optimizations we could find in the first month of usage.
It makes me sad when I'm forced to work with graphite/prometheus/grafana in my newer company. These can't gather half the metrics and their charting capabilities are so bad in comparison.
Their pricing is pretty ridiculous at times and their sales people are often way over aggressive. You have to pay extra for containers on a host. They also make it impossible to keep users from consuming additional paid features.
I like having Datadog when I need to debug, but I'm pretty sick of the dark patterns and surprise bills. I'll probably go with Prometheus in my next greenfield.
I dread having to go back to Prometheus because the company is too cheap to pay for proper tooling (datadog) and developers would rather write their own time series database for their resume.
Disclaimer: I used to work there.
Datadog doesn't do that specific feature as well (it has alternatives), but it also has so many other features that all tie together very nicely: metrics, logging, events, very good dashboards, analysis notebooks, alerting, SLOs, performance monitoring, trace analysis, security monitoring. It's a really extensive product.
When it comes to general observability, I'm a strong believer that you need a wide range of different views – just logs aren't enough, just metrics aren't enough, etc. I've worked in a team trying to use Prometheus for everything and there was so much friction, whereas with Datadog there has always been a way to achieve something.
I think Honeycomb is a good feature that should be bought by a company like Datadog and integrated into a wider more mature feature set.
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/datadog/id1391380318 Android (Play store): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.datadog.ap...
SQL Server: it's not cheap, but it's genuinely good. Live query plans, clustered columnstore indices, linked servers, rich SQL features.
Tableau: more than a dashboarding tool, it's actually a really good multivariate exploratory data analysis (EDA) tool. You can use it to visualize multidimensional data easily. I do use Jupyter (seaborn, plotly) and R (ggplot2) which are good, but Tableau lets you touch your data and move stuff around in a more fluid fashion. The UI lets you really interact deeply with your data. I find that on a new dataset, I can get usable results out of Tableau faster than if were to muck around with ggplot2's syntax, even though I'm familiar with the latter. There is a learning curve for Tableau though, especially around how to structure your data for visualization (you have to think in SQL-like operations). It's not just dragging-and-dropping -- a certain mindset is required.
Active Directory: it's just there. It's pretty decent.
Visual Studio: I don't use this every day, but I do maintain a complex C# codebase from time to time (among other things), and Visual Studio (not VS Code! though I like VS Code too) is genuinely a pleasant IDE. I'm a big fan of the C# language and the integration with dev tooling is unparalleled e.g. solid refactoring, peeks, referencing, Intellisense, etc. The IDE supplies a ton of guards to help avoid human errors.
Splunk: it's good. Not the cheapest though.
The most common workarounds are for folks coming in with an Excel mindset (where operations are cell-level) who want to accomplish something that is easy in Excel but hard in Tableau. For instance, almost everything in Tableau is an aggregation, so displaying a simple unaggregated table is actually really hard (you have to make certain fields Dimensions, others Values, etc).
In Tableau, almost every operation maps to some SQL operation (in fact, you can peek at the underlying SQL query if you run the profiler), so mastery of Tableau almost always entails mastery of deep SQL concepts.
Why doesn't Tableau make easy things easy, say like Excel does? The trouble is Excel’s reactive cell level operations don't scale. Tableau lets you connect to massive backend databases to compute and display multifaceted viz's with relatively high performance, and the only way it can accomplish this is to restrict itself to SQL-friendly operations.
This difference is philosophically analogous to using for loops vs vectorized operations - the latter requires a mindset shift, and is less flexible/granular than the former but you gain a tremendous performance boost.
There is to my knowledge no way to automate edition of workbooks. You are in for GUI repetitive soul sucking task. Bonus pain if "workaround" are involved. (Just have a look at the support forum... well not the good time they just revamped it... many answer involve 10+ manuals GUI steps)
I still use it, overall still pretty good at what it does best. But I'm actively seeking alternative.
And as long as I don't install resharper I've found visual studio to be pretty snappier even up to a million loc solutions.
Splunk is miles ahead when it comes to search and visualizations. You can just do things and join that the other tools don't support at all.
The only downside is speed, Splunk can only find a few hundreds thousands results a second so it's slow as hell when there are lots of matches. (Kibana doesn't give more than the first 500 results so it's totally cheating on that aspect).
ElasticSearch and everything built on top of it has catastrophic issues with typing. Every field is typed, say integer or string, and sending/having data in the wrong type will prevent to do operations (smaller than, greater than, sum, additional) and can crash the database. It's wild whereas Splunk can ingest and aggregate mixed data just fine.
Cheaper alternatives? You can roll your own logging server with fluentd and a database. Some folks will recommend elasticsearch, but we tried it and it was challenging to set up just right.
2) jailer. I'm a visual kind of guy. so this makes database analysis very easy.
3) onenote. if only it had Linux app i would use it for personal use.
4) visual studio 2019. customized to the bone to be uber productive
5) Autohotkey. got a ms 4000 ergonomic keyboard and binding all keys a journey in itself
I'll stop right here but i have tons of other tools i really enjoy using.
2) ulauncher (for linux), executor (for windows). oh how i love just typing "az 12345" and it shows my azure devops bug in chrome.
3) obs studio. when i want to force myself to focus i record myself doing the tasks and talking my way through it. give it a try
im away from my computer so this is just some of the things i remember
Extensions:
Roslynator
Codemaid
Productivity Power Tools - pack of extensions
_________
And maybe disable option: Reopen documents on solution load
It's in tools -> options -> projects and solutions -> general
2) snippets designer plugin. enjoy snippet creation
3) macros. crashes most of the time tho. sometimes im too lazy to pop a terminal and type my git alias so here we are.
4) disable some features to increase loading time. (lots of articles around)
there are others but these are my top 4
There's definitely problems with it (its performance can be awful and require dedicated server clusters to keep it up at larger orgs), but come on let's be honest, it's a huge success story and lets orgs do things "their way" with project management and software development.
It’s all due to local configuration, some IT kiddo sees all these bells and whistles and levers to pull, so they turn them all on thinking more features is better.
In the meantime the most efficient workflow I have has six states (planning, execution, UAT, deployment, warranty, closed) and it works just fine and stays out of my way.
Maybe the user experience can be good if the org is big enough to have 2-3 people managing JIRA full time but I'd hate to be one of those 2-3 people.
The Dashboard within Jira that we created has been really great as I have been using it along the charts it produces to communicate with my business partners. The data that we collect isn't perfect, but its good enough to construct a narrative that my business partners can grok. I have most recently used this information to help in successful pitch for a strategic re-design of our systems as well as an ambitious resourcing proposal to go along with it. Knowing how much of your time is lost to overhead allows me to plan ahead and justify the people that I need to make the redesign happen.
Jira having an API has been a real boon too. Personally I have used it with Python to mine for additional data that I need in reporting where the Jira dashboard is insufficient. I have also had my team's dedicate DevOps engineer drive all sorts of integrated work flow automation to ease the development process. My team operates within a large bureaucratic organization, so having the capability to automate all the artifacts for compliance has been a real time savings.
The integration with Confluence is awesome. It really makes managing my teams work so much easier. I love to collect meeting feedback notes in confluence and then tag the bullet points with Jira tasks that I create as follow up work. The Jira issue tables driven by JQL (Jiras Issue Query Language) are super useful when I need to create project plans that combine a mixture of content. I love just dropping in a list of all the tickets that we have outstanding.
I would not be nearly as effective w/o the combination of both tools.
JIRA does have a few technical failings. As you pointed out, its performance can be a problem. Additionally, as a normal user, I find its search lacking. If I want to find the story I worked on 6 months ago that involved adding middle name to the user table, I'm better off hunting through my commit log or my notes than using JIRA search.
Its suggestions stuff is nice, and it works reasonably well. In particular it supports multiple languages much better than Eclipse's motley range of plugins. So I can see why your list of uses makes it the superior option there.
But for primarily Java development, which is where I encounter it and the most vocal love for it, it lacks a couple of key features (or non-obvious configuration to enable them I guess?)
* You can't run code unless the whole project compiles (poor for quick sanity check, test driven development, and refactoring breaking changes).
* You don't get the "problems" view of compilation issues (and optionally analysis output like findbugs) so as often as not I'll try to run a test, building the whole shebang, when the end result will be needing to fix a trivial syntax error. Eclipse tells me that first.
* It's a pain to use when working with multiple (source independent) projects simultaneously. E.g. a library project and the main project. Eclipse lets you open anything you want to in the same window and presents them in the same explorer view.
It also, anecdotally, feels slower than Eclipse, and seems to enjoy popping up focus-stealing windows more often than Eclipse (though I guess I can cuss Gnome just as much for that one).
I don't hate it, but I do miss Eclipse.
Edit: I should add that it supports Gradle rather better than Eclipse does, but since I really dislike Gradle I'm not sure how much of a plus that is!
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...
There are literally 20-40 serious bugs that impact me daily.
Nevertheless I still think Intellij is an awesome piece of software and I still start it sometimes to get useful features which are not available in Metals, like inline type annotations for long method chains (really useful when coding with Cats) or "show implicit hints" to see which implicits are used / missing and where.)
- UltraEdit. What Photoshop is to images, UltraEdit is to text. The weird thing is, it’s not a super flashy or even immediately intuitive tool. But once you get the hang of it, it never fails to deliver.
- Excel. It’s insane the breadth of stuff you can do with it. And as a tool, it’s equally handy and “oh my God this will save me so much work” for a school teacher as it is for a data analyst and stock broker. It sort of scales infinitely, there is always one more level of complexity/usefulness to unlock.
Quote from someone that is not me and not my particular issue, but that expresses the sort of problems endemic to Excel and MS software in general:
"When data is refreshed, I get a message box "Send a Frown" at unpredictable, inconsistent intervals. For example, it will work seamlessly for five or six times then suddenly it will fail, and give this "Send a frown" message.
A normal VBA error handler does not deal with this "Send a frown" message. Not even an "On Error Resume next" deals with it. I can thus not capture or step-over the error (err) and deal with it in my code. When the "Send a frown" message appears, the entire process is on hold until I (the human) clicks on "Send a frown" or "Cancel". This is problematic since this process runs 3am in the morning on our servers for about 200 connection refreshes."
It definitely isn't fancy but it works well for larger files and things like column mode and perl regex searches are just so nice in certain cases. I'm finding it hard to put down especially since I do a lot of Perl and I haven't found a big benefit for an IDE there.
Open a 200mb horribly formatted text file. Apply some regex find-replace to remove some cruft. Let UE format it into nice columns. All seamlessly, also for huge files.
I've kept UltraEdit around for more than 20 years now. Column editing, especially back when it was introduced, saved my bacon more than a few times.
I find this tool very very useful when you have lots of integration job. If you have an enterprise version, then you can do stuff like compare and merge files across two servers, compare PDFs, ZIPs, JAR, and obviously plain text files. This is a tool for which I definitely ask for an Enterprise Version license whenever I join a new organization.
the ability to compare and merge directories is also nice (although a number of open source diff and merge tools also support this -- e.g. kdiff3, meld)
I simply bought myself a license and use it on both the company and personal machines.
My personal favorite is the Git mergetool integration with gives me a three-way merge (with the common ancestor). This is absolutely indispensable when trying to do complex merging and has saved me countless hours.
The only people are I've met that all love SAP are SAP employees living in my area, which isn't too surprising I guess.
Is HN overrun by coding noobs who are pathologically handicapped in the size of their vocabulary? How the eff is 'IntelliJ' an enterprise s/w?
It Just Works™. Which you'd just take for granted with something as simple as MFA, but we had two previous enterprise products that were garbage. Duo just does its thing, gets out of the way, and I can keep working.
It is one of those things you appreciate because you never think about it.
Every time I want to be dismissive of the product, it's exceeded what I believed to be an extremely unlikely to meet set of expectations.
They've clearly got some pretty competent people. I'd love to draft them somehow
Beyond that, the services of namecheap Ava digital ocean. They clearly have developers who rely on the product. All the elements are there and they work well.
Azure's python libraries I find way easier than AWS's boto3, which for some reason always reminds me of dbus programming. I keep meaning to try Google's bud I haven't yet.
I also have been meaning to write one that somehow transparently uses things like rsync/scp with some partitioning strategy so you can migrate say a personal project costing you $50/month, generating you $0 and used by only a few dozen people to potentially a lot less.
(I've got numerous large scale efforts that almost nobody uses...)
One issue for us with Google form is that file uploads cannot be done by non-google accounts, this works well in Airtable.
I'll see if I can get a screenshot later
* DataDog (distributed tracing is a dream)
* IntelliJ (idea, goland, pycharm, clion, datagrip)
* MindNode (macOS-only mind-mapping software)
Recently started using smart sheets, but on the fence about this one so far.
We have had good experience with Tableau but had to do some custom Rest API programming for #1 .. Feel free to PM
Freezes and crashes are often caused by bad plugins setup by your company.
Could you please share some example usecases you implemented ?
Aside from a couple chip vendor's IDEs (Analog Devices and Atmel, both at a previous employer), I've always used the open source stack for embedded debugging and found it adequate. Just wondering what I'm missing out on?
While there are certainly some rough edges in the OSS stack, they've been no worse than the commercial solutions I've tried. And at least in principle, I can fix issues in the OSS tooling.
Maybe the only thing to hate about Trace32 is its very clumsy UI. I'd rather use a TUI than their Motif/Qt based one.
I have to disagree with you on their support. But things may have changed since 10 years ago.
Is the absence of a Kanban board a deal breaker? Perhaps for management.
How does LANSweeper detect devices? CDP, SNMP, etc?
It's enterprise and comes with that price tag, but the cost of it is covered by the labor hours it saves.
The only alternatives are network shares filled with v1_v2_final_edited filenames and very expensive, SAP-level of complexity and JIRA-style approval workflows.
Unfortunately they are owned by Stratasys, the Oracle of 3D printing and the product is barely maintained. When it was acquired they made it free. It was meant to become the github (in terms of de facto standard for public repositories) of 3D CAD, and be an inroad to 3D printer / 3D printing service sales. But that aspect never took off, Stratasys is bleeding marketshare and an at any time I expect to login and see that the service is discontinued.
Getting off-topic but I'm interested to see if there are any replies:
For all software engineers reading this, I can't state how behind other engineering disciplines are compared to software. The equivalent to git or SVN or even CVS never appeared as standard practice and there is barely any middle ground between no version control whatsoever and formal change control boards (which is no version control whatsoever except at a few milestones and if you're lucky you can verify a change to the milestone by checking a paper or dvd).
Outside of software, academic spin-offs tend to start with good practices, such as markdown or latex files for documentation, which work well with version control, but never seem to make it more than 5 years before they reach a state of no control / word documents.
Electrical CAD is becoming better, with more software-background hobbyist and more open source tools arriving. It helps that design files and manufacturing files started to converge in the 80s due to early automation and thus tend to be text-based and diffable. Mechanical CAD on the other hand tends to be somewhat incompatible between vendors and binary in nature. The open source alternatives (FreeCAD and OpenSCAD) are a decade away from providing 1990s features and hobbyists have free licenses to proprietary software (eg Fusion 360) so there is very little pressure to make a good tools in the open source world.
I was honestly extremely hopeful when OnShape hit the market. Granted it was still a proprietary tool, but felt it had the tooling and integrations to bring CAD systems into the "modern era". Then they crippled their free offering, removing it's discrimination from tools like Fusion. And now with their purchase by PTC, I have no hope in it making any further waves in the CAD space.
I'm sure many people on HN have experience meeting a one-person self-taught software team in a small company that developed their own version control system called "copying folders". In mechanical CAD, half of the industry is at that level, but it's even worse because your shard libraries may be updated irreversibly and without notification when you don't intend, or not updated when you intend, depending on such factors as the order in which you loaded your projects.
I was sad enough that GrabCAD was purchased by Stratasys, but at least it's plausible that it exists for a while. I didn't know OnShape was purchased by PTC. I was also really hopeful and play around with it about once a year. It's always missing something I need, but was getting close, and some of the features they add are really innovative. They are also honest about what features are missing.
On the other hand, I still have a soft spot for Pro-E since it was my first MCAD package and to this day miss some of its parametric features (but certainly not its interface).
I also am much more likely to prioritize Slack messages over email. It is just Skype with bells on, but it's still very good in it's own right.
5 years ago I encouraged team to use slack more, now I encourage to avoid it at all cost and use email
It's also a pain closing as it prompts do I want to save. Saving as a CSV is a pain, it takes two prompts to save as a CSV.
File recovery is also a pain.
No intergration with something like Jira, no support for pull-requests/merge-request, navigation is pretty terrible.
For saas, probably Workday. I really enjoy it compared to what we had used prior.
...no
Just because Microsoft wrote it doesn't make it enterprise
When you've maxed out on what you can do with spreadsheets.
I’ve helped manage both PagerDuty and OpsGenie at a certain employer, and while PagerDuty seemed to mostly kinda semi sorta work, there was a lot of klunky aspects to the system. When we switched to OpsGenie, it was like all the things we liked about PagerDuty were still present, but we didn’t have any of the pain points. Moreover, there were additional features that made it even nicer.
Imagine how good it feels when you stop banging your head against the wall, and then realize you’ve been banging your head against a wall for the past few years.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the PagerDuty guys and everything they’ve done as pioneers in this field, but I much prefer OpsGenie.
In fact, OpsGenie is such low-touch that we now have many fewer people who are involved in the day to day management of it, each team can manage the things they really care about, and the rest of us can just get on with our other work.
Now I use Loggly... It's okay.
IDEA's IDEs as others have mentioned.
I've built enterprise software I enjoyed using (reputation.com), does that count? :)
- Agent Ransack is a GUI for findstr. Much nicer to use than the one in Notepad++.
- VS 2019 is incredible. I weep for the parallel universe where we’re all stuck using Eclipse for everything.
I find Teams to be incredibly bad. It's slow, it literally has a typing lag to the point where you type something, press enter to send and then start another message, letters get eaten and sent with previous message. It eats more ram than JetBrains IDE at this point. It has a very bad UX, a lot of (slow) tab switching, pictures do not even load for me most of the time(unless restarted), sometimes it takes up to 10 seconds to mark something as read on the 'Activity' tab which is even more annoying. Insanely bad custom notification system instead of using built in Windows notifications. Add to that terrible API, weird flow of adding apps to conversations and few more things. It grew to become my most hated application that I have to use every day.
Second best: Office 365
there a bunch of other tools I use/love but I'm not sure they would qualify as 'enterprise', but here they are just in case:
VScode, notepad++, Agent Ransack, code compare, Dark reader chrome extension, Fork (git-client tool for MacOS),linqPad
Okta - Just works, good UI
Workday - I seem to be in the minority but the clean UI + generally decent tooling allows for a decent deal to be in there
Everything I've used from Hashicorp has been good once you learn it. Vault is better than anything that came before it. Terraform is better than anything that came before it. Packer is excellent. Gonna try using consul connect for my next project. The learning curve is pretty steep on these things, but they are definitely force multipliers.
I'm also gonna say Eclipse. It seems to get a lot of hate, but I've used it so much for so long that it feels very natural. I've mostly switched to VSCode, but that is more a function of moving on to new languages that are better supported in VSCode.
* it breaks native keyboard shortcuts. After disabling the shortcut overrides in settings, "/" is a NOP (which is weird, since disabling the overrides worked in Confluence)
* the markup is non-standard (but I can live with it)
* sometimes it will log me out when I want to post a comment and all of what I wrote in the comment box gets lost
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is also awesome. I wish we could have 8, but that's not quite in the pipeline yet. The distro is crazy stable. With the Extras, Optionals, EPEL, etc. repositories enabled you get access to almost all of the best software in the Linux ecosystem.
Ansible, particularly Red Hat Ansible Engine, is also amazing for managing all of my Red Hat servers. I couldn't imagine doing half of my job by hand, as nothing would ever really get done. With Ansible you just fire off a playbook and relax.
I can list gripes for days, and I wish thunderbird would integrate with all the features of exchange better, but I don't know how anyone gets by work with webmail. I feel such a lack of control in my personal gmail box.
Do you mean Enterprise Resources Planning systems like SAP R/3 v. Oracle Applications?
Beyond it's shortcomings it's something I'd gladly pay for (if I needed it of course) because it can't really be replaced by something free / opensource.
dynatrace - expensive as hell, but really really useful for large organisations if you are operating your own software and depend on its functionality - read: financial biz etc.
- Hashicorp Vault (secret management)
- Duo Security (2FA)
- StrongDM (Database authentication and auditing)
Both have excellent UIs and they are truly powerful.
Avoid any Graffana based solutions, the only good thing I can say about them is that they are free.
It was just better than the regular ssh client.
Really worth it's price, if anything because you can create a set of sessions and share them with all your colleagues.
DbVisualizer -> best GUI for databases, you learn it well and use for all databases
Editpad -> fastest text editor I’ve ever seen with bunch of useful features and terrific regex (see regexbuddy from the same author)
They work really well
