Errplane, a new Y Combinator-backed service for monitoring performance, uptime and errors for any type of web application, has officially launched its service. Currently, Errplane argues, developers need a number of different services like New Relic, Pingdom and Airbrake to effectively monitor their apps. Errplane unifies all of these functions into one single service, because, as the company’s CEO and co-founder Paul Dix told me last week, all of these separate tools ultimately rotate around the same goal you are trying to accomplish.
About a third of the current Y Combinator class is already using the service, which Dix co-founded with Todd Persen, as well as a number of other companies, including Garry Tan’s PostHaven for Posterous exiles, VHX, Brewster, Amicus and RingRevenue. Across all of these beta customers, the system currently handles about 30 million data points per day.
Errplane provides developers with an easy-to-use API that ensures that an apps’ vital signs constantly flow into Errplane’s database, including request response time, exceptions and other performance stats. With a bit of extra code, developers can also enable heartbeat tracking (to ensure background processes haven’t failed), information about background job completion time and more detailed information about user behavior.
The service, of course, also provides numerous options for getting alerts when something fails, including the ability to get SMS alerts, emails and chatroom messages in Hipchat, Campfire and similar tools.
To get started, developers only have to insert a few lines of code and the system should be ready to go. Currently, Errplane offers libraries for Ruby on Rails, Python and Node.js, but the company plans to add support for JavaScript, Java, PHP and .NET very soon. While the team is currently focusing on web platforms, Dix told me that it’s also considering to branch out into mobile, and an iOS version will likely launch once the team has the major web platforms covered.
One nice feature of Errplane, as Dix told me, is that the service provides a default dashboard, but because it offers a comprehensive API, developers can also integrate it with their existing dashboards or build their own dashboards from scratch. The API exposes all of the data the service collects, and while some of its competitors often just provide developers with one-minute averages, Errplane gives you full access to all of your stats. Indeed, one of the things the team learned from its beta customers is that they didn’t just want to see average but that they wanted to be exposed to all of the data.
Interestingly, the team used Google’s Go programming language for a number of critical components. The team previously experimented with using Cassandra and Scala for its datastore, but eventually settled on Go, which seems to be making inroads with developers lately, as we’ve heard from a number of companies about its advantages lately. Cloudflare, for example, recently told us it is using it for its Railgun implementation.
Looking ahead, the Errplane team hopes to make the system even smarter and provide developers with an early warning system before major issues actually occur. Before that, though, Errplane plans to provide users with more user-interface options and new ways to visualize their data.
For now, developers can sign up here to give it a try. There is a free plan for developers who are just testing their apps internally, and post-launch plans start at $99/month.