Customer Value¶
Using Guance will give users the following value enhancements compared to open source products.
| Cases | Self-built Open Source Product | Guance |
|---|---|---|
| A Monitoring System | Dedicated technical team for at least 3 months, and that's just for early stage. | 30 minutes out of the box. |
| Related Cost Investment | A simple open source monitoring product hardware investment requires more than 20,000 / year, if the cloud era observable platform is at least 100,000 / year fixed investment (estimated in cloud hardware). | Pay-as-you-go, flexible cost based on actual business situation, overall cost is more than 50 % lower than the combined investment of using open source products. |
| System Maintenance Management | It requires the long-term attention and investment of professional technical engineers, a variety of open source products mixed use also increases the complexity of management. | No need for extra attention, sparing time to focus on business problems. |
| Number of Robes to Be Installed on the Server | Each open source software requires a probe, and a lot of server performance is taken up by the probe. | One probe, fully based on binary operation with extremely low CPU and memory footprint. |
| Value Delivered | Depend on the ability of the company's own engineers and their ability to drill down into open source products. | All-around data-based platform with full observability, allowing engineers to use data to solve problems. |
| Root Cause Analysis of Performance and Failure | Depend on the team's own capabilities. | Quick location based on data analysis. |
| Security | A variety of mixed open source software, testing the overall ability of technical engineers. | Comprehensive security scanning and testing, customer-side code open-sourced to users and products iteratively updated in a timely manner to ensure security. |
| Scalability and Services | Need to build one's own team of SRE engineers. | Professional services equivalent to deploying an external SRE support team. |
| Training and Support | Hire trainers from outside. | Long-term online training support. |
From the above table, it can be seen that a team's investment in ensuring the stability and reliability of the overall system can be significant, which goes beyond the cost of the software itself. Although open-source software may appear to be cost-free, the corresponding investment in cloud services or physical servers, time investment, and potential duplicate investments due to turnover in the technical team also need to be considered. Therefore, a team should adopt more efficient ways to ensure the development of its business, rather than investing a large amount of resources in non-professional matters. Professional matters should be handled and executed by professional services.
In reality, the cost of a team's investment in system assurance often exceeds 30% to 50% of the overall construction and maintenance costs of the system. This includes the server resources consumed by various open-source probes, the server investment required for deploying open-source software, and the corresponding investment in maintenance and monitoring systems. In addition, developers, testers, and operations engineers spend a great deal of effort dealing with how to identify various faults and anomalies, consuming a significant amount of working time. This does not even include the business losses caused by system failures due to a lack of observability, which are hidden costs. Teams that do not use powerful observability platforms often find themselves facing the dilemma of investing significant hidden costs and wasting a lot of time costs.
Choosing Guance allows a technical team to not only get a very powerful observable product, but also save a lot of explicit and implicit costs in system assurance. Most importantly, it allows each team to focus on their own business.