RudderStack's company blog covers customer data pipelines, its Segment alternative, and the engineering choices behind its product.
HN commenters mention RudderStack as an open source Segment alternative for routing data to multiple destinations, alongside PostHog, Snowplow, and Hightouch.
Yes, there are tools such as PostHog[0] that you can deploy on your servers. You can have events, users, funnels, etc. It shows you how people are moving around. It shows you clicks, page views, page leaves, etc. It shows you retention charts.
You can also use the client to create custom events.
When you move things to "the cloud". Take a look at Sentry[1] for error monitoring. It'll show you errors and exceptions aggregated instead of you looking into logs for exceptions and errors. It has integrations with GitLab, Slack, etc.
Additional resources you might be interested in are Segment[2] and RudderStack[3].
One good way to get things going is to have a way to interact with your users. Having a button that says "Send us an issue" for when they have problems with an `href` that opens a mail client with a prefilled template and email addresses can be useful.
<a href="mailto:support@yourstartup.com?cc=founder@yourstartup.com;cofounder@yourstartup.com&subject=The issue title&body=You can have a template here" rel="email">Complain!</a>
Another useful thing is to have either Slack channels so people can ask for help there, or help each other out to solve their problems. Essentially building a community.
(I'm biased against chatbots, but you may not have an allergic reaction).
Essentially, all these help focus on issues based on impact (positive or negative) and frequency.
When you get the 20th user complains about something, you know the next thing is to get that…
RudderStack (https://rudderstack.com/) founder here. We have a different pricing vector (event-volume vs monthly-users/MTUs of Segment) so it's not directly comparable. Having said that, RudderStack can be much cheaper in two scenarios
1) Low # of events per users. For example, if you have a lot of anonymous users who don't do many events and leave. In this case, you may have a lot of MTUs but low number of events. True for a lot of consumer businesses.
2) You have a huge scale (10s to 100s of millions of events per day). In that scenario, we support deploying enterprise
RudderStack inside your VPC but still managed by us. In this case, we don't have to incur infra/data-transfer cost (and charge 80% margin) so can be much much cheaper. We have a couple of customers in this model. Some choose this for privacy/security reasons.
In normal scenarios too we can be 50% or more cheaper. Unlike Segment, we don't store any data (which is a major cost) so our COGS are quite lower. We use your warehouse for all the CDP features.
I think yes, all these products -> https://segment.com, https://rudderstack.com, https://snowplowanalytics.com, https://fivetran.com, https://stitchdata.com, https://www.alooma.com, https://singer.io, https://www.holistics.io, can work as a pipeline, but some have more features than others.
This is a bit simplifying answer.
You might wanna check out Rudderstack or Stitchdata:
https://rudderstack.com/guides/how-to-load-data-from-google-sheets-to-redshift
https://www.stitchdata.com/blog/google-sheets-stitch-easy-sync-to-redshift/
And here's a reverse path from Census as well:
https://www.getcensus.com/sync/redshift-to-google-sheets
Hi Dan,
Impressive profile. I think you would be a great fit for us. Can you take a look at https://www.rudderstack.com/ and shoot me an email at chandra@rudderstack.com. We can discuss further.
We can connect on linkedin too (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chandrashekar-v-b37861a/)
Chandra Shekar
In bigger setups, all you want is a data collector and router so that you can feed the data into multiple destinations, depending on the use case. Analytics is just one. Example: https://www.rudderstack.com/ & https://www.rudderstack.com/replace-google-analytics-4-guide/