What do you like best about Better Stack?
I mostly use Uptime service(formerly Better Uptime) for monitoring, while also using Logs occasionally to grab logs from Cloudflare and couple of linux VMs. I will mostly talk about Uptime because that's what I mostly use. But Better Stack Logs also has powerful features, I don't use most of them but you should check it out.
It is really easy to get started with uptime monitoring. Monitoring a server? A simple ping check will do. If not, you can monitor any URL, any port of any IP, check IMAP/SMTP, or even check HTTP responses for keywords for checking. Do you want to monitor something that has no exposed service to the Internet, like your home router behind CGNAT? No problem. just put a "curl https://uptime.betterstack.com/api/v1/heartbeat/xxxxxx" on crontab, or find a way to ping the URL at any interval you choose, and you're done. If no heartbeat is received within selected interval, after a confirmation period, alarm goes off.
If you want to go even further, their simple yet powerful API and integrations look like they can take you even further, but for smaller operations it is not needed. I, for example, used Zapier integration to post an alert to my Discord server when stuff goes down.
There are integrations with popular services such as heroku, Google Cloud, or Webhook in/out (so you can create incidents via webhooks if you don't want to go with API yet get similar function) that you can use to both "import data" and "export data", Importing being monitoring or creating alerts/incidents from other services, and exporting being alerting via other services, like Trello or Slack(similar to my discord example).
When an alarm goes off, yes you get an email, yes you can see it on the page, standard stuff. If that's not enough, you can get notifications in literally anywhere else you choose thanks to integrations I mentioned. No Internet at all? Well, if you don't have internet you can't really do anything about the issue that may arise, but at least you'll know something is wrong because you can choose to get called on your phone by Better Stack. It will not be a real person, obviously it's a robocall, but you'll still get notified and you can even acknowledge the incident on the phone call if you're on it so it doesn't call others.
The design of the status page is slick and easy to understand, you can edit the basic layout of the services you want to show on the page(you don't have to show all of them) and you can manually create and edit incidents, maintenance notices and more. You have quite a few customization options if you want to dig in, but honestly you'll feel just fine with the default settings.
Customer support is just amazing. They will answer your questions directly, without sending you random help articles like any other service does. I am using this service for more than a year, and I did not have any major issues, and couple of minor issues were quickly addressed thanks to the customer service being super fast and straight to point. They know their customers are usually IT people, so they don't spend time explaining stuff that everyone already knows. Only major-ish issue I had was their status page itself going down every now and then before(I added the status page itself to their status monitor just for the sake of it, how ironic lol), but they were already aware of the problems even before I asked what's going on.
As I said, I am using this service for over a year at this point, and I do not plan on giving up at all. If they keep operating for 10 years, I will keep using this service for 10 years, for my personal projects as well as any professional work I might do, and I will happily pay for it because it is 1000% worth the money imo. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Better Stack?
Status pages can definitely get some more user-friendly customization options. You can choose between multiple layouts and even put your own CSS/JS code, which should allow you to do literally everything, but I don't think that's the most user friendly way to do it. Design of the status page itself is pretty decent and you will not have an issue to use it as is, but being able to more easily customize it would be nice to have.
Also I saw on the pricing page that some features I am currently enjoying as a free user is no longer being offered to new free users, and even some of them, such as ability to use your own domain, are only offered on Enterprise plan, which greatly reduces the usability of the service on lower/free tiers. While it is nice that they don't take features away from existing users(that's the easiest way to get your users angry, for example, look at twitter), but I would expect a bit more transparency while this change took place, I only realized this is the case after I recommended the product to another geek friend of mine only for him to realise that he cannot have some features I have without paying quite a considerable amount of money.
And on the Logs, they primarily use Vector to collect logs from all kinds of services across platforms. While vector itself is not a bad system, sometimes it randomly stops working and errors out, resulting in logs from servers not appearing on the service. That's probably something customer service can asisst me for a solution, but I had other issues with the vector itself in other use cases I don't really want to deal with it and I'd prefer alternative methods being offered for Debian systems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
