Comment by netshade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netshade | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Awesome, great to see Instrumental (https://instrumentalapp.com/) in your list. I'm one of the folks working on it, would love to hear your thoughts on us.

Some quick reviews of some of the products listed:

* Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com) - Bug Tracker - good for keeping track of simple stuff last I used it (~2 years ago), but Github Issues obviated its use for me.

* Pivotal (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/) - Project Management - great tool, not trivial to keep well managed tho. Easy to let your project get out of hand with tons of tickets, requires some discipline in its use.

* Trello (https://trello.com/) - Project Management - simple, fast. Really great for keeping tasks focused on a small team, I'm not sure how it would suit a larger team though.

* Airbrake (http://airbrake.io/) - Error Handling - You didn't have this in your list, but it deserved a mention. It's okay for server side error handling, its client side stuff leaves something to be desired though. More often than not their hosted JS lags on load, causes your page load times to go up as well. Doesn't currently offer a supported hosted version.

* Stripe - (https://stripe.com/) - Billing & Payment Processing - Does just about everything right imo. Great documentation, great interface, website is well engineered. Analytics / reporting would be awesome tho.

* Intercom - (http://intercom.io/) - Support/Help Desks - I seriously love Intercom. For managing a team of people doing outreach to users, it is awesome. I view it as a fantastic tool for triaging retention.

* Uservoice - (http://uservoice.com/) - Support/Help Desks - You didn't mention them either, but I thought I'd add. They are pretty great, even for small companies. I think their sweet spot is a larger support team tho. Great interface.

Pivotal: Horrible, abysmal tool. Hate it with a passion. No clear overview at all, UI is full of shiny colors but is messy as hell. I'm really glad we've switched to Jira[1] after fighting with pivotal for a couple of months. YMMV ofcourse :)

[1] http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/overview

Pivotal is an agile planning tool; JIRA is an issue tracking and classical project management tool. While each can be coerced to the other's function, it's really comparing apples and oranges. I'll admit that JIRA and Pivotal continue to muddy the differentiation with afterthought additions like JIRA's Greenhopper and Pivotal's time tracking. But JIRA is a good tool for issue tracking and Pivotal is a good tool for agile planning. If you're trying to use either tool for the other's purpose, you'll hate it.

I still can't read "tool for agile planning" without crying inside my head. We really need "tools" to "implement" "processes" in the spirit of a 6-line manifesto, do we? Sigh.

Aww. Don't cry. It's not a process tool. It's a prioritized to-do list that can track your velocity. Despite being opinionated, it doesn't enforce a process. Though you'll find that if you don't embrace those 6 lines, you'll quickly make a mess inside Pivotal and it will happily let you do so.

I definitely agree with the YMMV bit; I have found this category of tools to be incredibly divisive. I know a lot of folks who thought that going in the opposite direction of yours, Jira to Pivotal, was one of the best decisions they've made for a project.

I've only ever casually used Jira, however, so am ill qualified to speak to its strengths.

I'm in the category you're describing. (Switched from Jira/Greenhopper to Pivotal and happy about it).

I think the divisive bit may, in part, be that Pivotal is a strongly opinionated tool while Jira is a fairly customizable and open ended tool.

For projects & teams committed to the process Pivotal champions, it's highly optimized. For teams using a different process, or who need to customize views for different people etc, Jira can provide more options, and be a better fit.

For me personally... at the moment, I really appreciate Pivotal's relative simplicity and the way it encourages folks to focus on the somewhat nearer term.

I love Pivotal. While I haven't used Jira, I've gotten the feeling that other members of my team have used it in the past, and don't like it at all. On another note, Siebel time tracking is a pit of hell.

Your demo is failing for me. Also does it show percentiles and alerts based on some rules?

Edit: That was due to JS being disabled in my browser

Percentiles is a feature we're planning on adding at some point in the future, though we have customers calculating it themselves right now using things like metriks-instrumental ( https://github.com/netshade/metriks-instrumental ).

Alerts is actually in beta right now :) - we're testing it out with a few customers. It's based on our query language, and alerts you with a graph of the problem when the event occurs. ( or updates an HTTP endpoint you control, if you wish )

edit: I forgot to mention, my apologies you encountered an error. We've been living on the edge of browser support land for the time being, and could do a better job letting you know that you're not meeting the minimum reqs.

Did I understand things correctly? Instrumental appears to be Ruby only...

Our agent (for in process collection) is Ruby only right now. That said, we've got a large number of customers who really like our graphs and query language, and so send us metrics using a Statsd backend[1] written by one of our other customers. (edit: which is to say that we really support anything that has a Statsd client)

[1]: https://github.com/collectiveidea/statsd-instrumental-backen...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com