Hey, as a solo entrepreneur that is following the motto: “if you cannot find a elixir job, create your own”, I’m searching for free and good alternatives to something critical in a web SaaS product, background job libraries, which includes free dashboards, given that the solo entrepreneur don’t have money to subscribe to costly observability tools like Datadog, neither time to expend doing non feature related code, which includes infrastructure. In this kind of scenario, Phoenix Dashboards are a must, and I can imagine ways to contribute to the SaaS Phoenix ecosystem, bringing other simple things like error tracking module that can substitute something like errbit. Last time I had to build a product, circa 2018, I used verk, which includes a free ready to use and very simple but useful dashboard that saved my life. Is this still the only alternative?
For something like DataDog you can use Grafana with Loki and OpenTelemetry. For error tracking I prefer Sentry over Errbit. Also Sentry added some APM stuff as well to their platform.
You can check out SigNoz ( GitHub - SigNoz/signoz: SigNoz is an open-source observability platform with logs, traces and metrics in a single application. An open-source alternative to DataDog, NewRelic, etc. 🔥 🖥. 👉 Open source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) & Observability tool) - it’s an open source datadog alternative
Not too sure about background jobs, but there’s blog on monitoring applications in elixir Monitor your Elixir application with OpenTelemetry and SigNoz | SigNoz
for the awesome Oban - you have free GitHub - evilmarty/oban_live_dashboard: A simple Phoenix Live Dashboard for Oban jobs.
This is something that should be included in the free version, but thanks 
SigNoz is nice and has been pointed out already.
I use this for my own projects and I’m very happy with it: GitHub - openobserve/openobserve: 🚀 10x easier, 🚀 140x lower storage cost, 🚀 high performance, 🚀 petabyte scale - Elasticsearch/Splunk/Datadog alternative for 🚀 (logs, metrics, traces, RUM, Error tracking, Session replay).
Though disclaimer: haven’t used it with Elixir yet, only Rust and Golang.
A very nice all-in-one APM solution.
Haven’t used in anger yet but I am looking at logflare (acquired by supabase).
I did notice they use the legacy streaming insertAll BigQery API which has a high ingestion cost instead of the newer BigQuery Storage Write API with much lower ingestion cost.
This is easy to address as it’s open source and Elixir. You can use the service or self host.
This is really good stuff. I like to see infrastructure things made in Erlang/Elixir, as once we had in Heroku with logplex (now deprecated). Thanks @adw632
Also their project tier is free so it might be good to try while you’re bootstrapping your SaaS.
I am also bootstrapping a SaaS, currently hence going down the same road as you identifying cost effective solutions that are still sound from a security compliance, architectural and scalability perspective. BigQuery ticks those boxes and I can meet my compliance requirements.
It would be interesting to see your journey and the tools you ended up with. I’ve dabbed previously with things like influxdb for metrics, but never went the full route of having a full fledged monitored system.
To me, just as a starting point, logs and a error tracking system are enough to start, but it’s good to know about cheap alternatives to extract the full power of telemetry enabled by Elixir.
