Retrace by Netreo

My overall experience with the Stackify Retrace is quite satisfying. I can easily afford the software for the great features it is offering. I can develop applications more efficiently and effectively. It is easy to use. I will recommend it to all the programmers or app developers out there.

I am using Stackify to monitor a multi-tier application in AWS, and was amazed at how easy it was to immediately get all of the servers reporting data on the app with no extra configuration. Our development team has been equally pleased with how simple it has been to have the application's logs fed right to Stackify and accessible from a single dashboard for our product support team. On top of that, the communication from the company has been outstanding. Even though our app is small, they have given us all the attention in the world. The team at Stackify has even provided multiple conference calls demoing their solution to different players in our company throughout the development cycle. And not a single bit of communication we received from Stackify during our evaluation was sales-focused - they really wanted to make sure that we knew exactly what we would be getting. After initially evaluating a competitor whose products seemed overly confusing and whose costs would have exceeded our total AWS bill, Stackify was an easy choice.

Initial impressions were great, we installed it on our staging and then production web servers. It provided an interesting look into the actual site performance without all the server noise. After some time both environments had sites that exhibited issues with the stackify agent. High page load times, timeouts, and general app instability was seen on some, but not all web apps on the server. These issues seemingly appeared out of no-where so perhaps it was an auto-update but we couldn't spend the time troubleshooting.

The only quick solution was remove the stackify software from those servers. The uninstall did not clean up after itself and left header information from stackify on all sites and all files seemed to remain in the installation directory. Tech support supplied incorrect remediation information for the header information issue and it caused the server downtime while the VM snapshot was reverted. Googling turned up the correct way of removing their changes.

Overall I'd say the beneficial insights gained into the app performance provided by the service were negated by the downtime and headaches created by the agent. Also we lost quite a bit of trust by the dev team in our efforts to provide them a stable platform for their applications. When ever there is an issue now the first question is, "Is Stackify still on that server?"

Our product management and testing has become more easy with the use of Retrace, kudos team !

Stackify gives peace of mind when it becomes extremely hard to find bugs. Just go for logs and you get to exact point where the application stalled. It gives alot information about the application. It is one of many tools that .net developer must have.