Nixstats is an easy to use server and monitoring tool. You can monitor your servers CPU, Memory, Disk I/O and many more metrics. The monitoring agent is open source and easy to extend with your own plugins, so you can basically monitor any metric and create charts and alerts.
Kevin William David interviewed Vincent Van Megen, Founder of Nixtstats to know more.
Hey Vincent, So tell us about Nixstats?
Nixstats is a server and website monitoring service. We keep track of the status of your servers and website and send you alerts in case something goes wrong. We store the data in our time series database, with the data you will be able to create custom dashboards.
Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?
Originally I was building this just for myself. I managed about 50 servers for myself and other companies. There were some open source and some closed source option but none of them really had everything I wanted or were very expensive.
What we’re trying to build is a dashboard that is a central place for all your data metrics.
How is Nixstats different from what already exists in the market?
Nixstats is easy to use, the monitoring agent is easy to install, it’s just a single command to run on all your servers. No need to add servers on the dashboard itself. As soon as you run the installer the server will appear on your dashboard.
Who uses Nixstats? Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Nixstats?
Nixstats is currently used by a wide variety of customers. We have a lot of small startups that use Nixstats to keep track of their metrics in the early stages, which helps when they’re optimizing their server setups. There are also some more established companies using Nixstats, recently we had a big influx of new sign ups from users moving from NewRelic.
Nixstats is also used by web and VPS hosting companies, they usually have many servers. Currently we’re working with some of these companies to integrate Nixstats within their panels.
How are your customers using Nixstats? Could you share a few different use cases?
Some of our customers are only interested in knowing if their server is online. Others require much more in depth information, they want to know for example if their database server does not have more than 1000 open connections.
Have there been unique use cases for Nixstats that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
Our monitoring agent has support for custom plugins, you can create your own or use the pre-made plugins we have available. We’ve had several interesting requests for plugins, such as a plugin to monitor printer ink level.
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
At the start we were an invite only beta, this got the ball rolling pretty well, in a couple of months we had over 500 beta testers. After that we introduced a public status page, this brought in even more users since it encourages users to share their uptime and server statistics.
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
The biggest challenge was finding the right data store for time series data. We’ve used MongoDB to solve this. As of now we’re storing over 1TB of data and overall it’s handling the load great.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?
For Slack and Rocket.Chat we’ve created a custom integration that allows the user to fetch graphs and statistics. This is done with a Outgoing webhook and some scripting for Rocket.Chat.
We also offer alerting to SMS, Email, Slack, Webhooks, Pushbullet, Pushover, Discordapp and Stride (HipChat).
Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?
We use Slack for internal communication. The google apps suite is also heavily used for e-mail as well as their other services. We use Amazon SES for our email delivery, Twilio for SMS. The live chat we really like is powered by Crisp, recently we’ve upgraded to their Unlimited plan which also includes a Knowledge base.
Originally published at siftery.com.