Customer Value¶
Using Guance will provide users with the following value improvements compared to open-source products:
Use Cases |
Self-built Open Source | Guance |
|---|---|---|
| Building a Cloud-era Monitoring System | Requires at least 3 months of investment from a specialized technical team, and that's just the beginning | Ready-to-use in 30 minutes |
| Associated Cost Investment | Even for a simple open-source monitoring product, hardware investment exceeds $20,000/year. For an observability platform in the cloud era, it requires at least a fixed investment of $100,000/year (estimated based on cloud hardware) | Pay-as-you-go, costs are elastic based on actual business needs, overall costs are more than 50% lower than the comprehensive investment in using open-source products. |
| System Maintenance Management | Requires dedicated technical engineers for long-term attention and investment; mixed use of various open-source products also increases management complexity | No need to worry, focus on business issues |
| Number of Probes to be Installed on Servers | Each open-source software requires a separate probe, consuming significant server performance | One probe, fully binary-based, with minimal CPU and memory usage |
| Value Delivered | Depends solely on the company's own engineers' capabilities and their proficiency with open-source products | Comprehensive data platform, full observability, enabling engineers to solve problems using data |
| Root Cause Analysis for Performance and Faults | Relies entirely on the team's own capabilities | Data-driven rapid identification |
| Security | Various mixed open-source software, testing the comprehensive skills of technical engineers | Comprehensive security scanning and testing, client-side code is open-sourced to users, and the product is updated timely to ensure security |
| Scalability and Services | Needs to build its own SRE engineer team | Provides professional services equivalent to having an external SRE support team |
| Training and Support | Hiring external trainers | Long-term online training support |
From the table above, it can be seen that ensuring the overall stability and reliability of a system may involve substantial investment, not just in software costs.
Although open-source software typically appears to require no monetary expenditure, the investments in cloud services or physical servers, time spent, and potential repeated investments due to changes in the technical team must also be considered.
Therefore, a team should adopt a more efficient approach to ensure the development of its business rather than investing large resources in non-core areas. Professional tasks should be handled by professional services.
In fact, a team's investment in system assurance often exceeds 30% to 50% of the total cost of system construction and maintenance. This includes server resources consumed by various open-source probes, server investments required for deploying open-source software, as well as corresponding maintenance and monitoring system investments. Additionally, developers, testers, and operations engineers spend considerable effort handling various faults and anomalies, consuming a lot of working hours. This does not include business losses caused by system failures due to lack of observability, which are all hidden costs. Teams that do not use powerful observability platforms often face high hidden costs and waste a lot of time.
Choosing Guance means the technical team gains a very powerful observability product, significantly reducing both visible and hidden costs associated with system assurance, helping each team focus on their core business.