Scalable and Reliable

When your application starts misbehaving, the last thing you want is for your error tracking system to fail or to run over quota.

Bugsink can deal with millions of events per day on dirt cheap hardware, so you can trust it to keep working when you need it most.

The numbers

Our hardware is a single 5 dollar per month VPS with:

• 2 VCPUs
• 4GB RAM

Our throughput:

• 30 events per second (50KB each)
• which is 2.5 million events per day
• which is 75 million events per month

That’s well over what you can select on the pricing pages of our competitors (which would put the monthly cost in the thousands of dollars). If you need even more, the above choice of hardware gives ample room for growth.

Feel free to run stress tests against your own installation: the necessary scripts are included with Bugsink.

Smart retention

When dealing with millions of events per day, disks fill up quickly. Bugsink comes with a nifty algorithm that decides which events to keep and which to throw away, based on a number of factors:

• The number of events for the issue (each subsequent event adds less new information, so the sampling rate goes down)
• The age of the event (older events are typically less relevant)

Alternatives

Compared to the alternatives, this means you’ll always have the most relevant events available, without having to worry about running out of disk space. Here’s what other error tracking systems typically do, and how Bugsink is different:

• Quota (e.g. 10.000 events per month) means you’ll never know if you’re missing important events once you’ve hit the quota. It also means you’ll have to worry about avoiding hitting the quota in the first place. With Bugsink’s smart retention, you just suck in all the events you can, and let Bugsink distill them down to the most relevant ones.
• A fixed retention period (e.g. 30 days) means you’ll lose potentially important error events after the retention period has passed. With Bugsink’s smart retention, age is just one of the factors that determines whether an event is kept or not, and the retention period can stretch to years if necessary.

Just because you can…

The goal of Bugsink is to help you fix your bugs. Which means that we’ve done a good job when you have as few errors as possible, and a bad one when you scale up to its capacity.

So what’s the point of all this scalability? Think of it as a safety net: you don’t want to have to worry about your error tracking system when you’re dealing with a crisis. Or ever, really.

Having said that: if just muting rather than fixing an often-occurring error is the right choice for you, that’s your choice: we don’t judge. And we can deal with the fall-out.

Interested? Get started with the installation guide or browse the documentation.