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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Spikelog – A simple metrics service for scripts, cron jobs, and MVPs

Hi all! I built Spikelog because I kept wanting to track simple numbers over time but every time I looked at proper observability tools, I'd bounce off the setup complexity. I wanted to make something that didn't require a lot of thinking to use. Spikelog is made to be as simple as possible: - POST a JSON with chart name + value (you can add some tags as well but I've not tested this part works yet) - Chart appears automatically - 1,000 point rolling window per chart (old data expires, no retention config) - Max 10 charts That's basically the whole product. I built it in about a day using…

Spikelog is a lightweight metrics service for tracking simple numbers over time from scripts, cron jobs, and early-stage projects. Users POST JSON data with a chart name and value, and charts appear automatically with… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1
    superlog▲497

    Hey HN, we’re Nico and Arseniy, co-founders of Superlog (https://superlog.sh). We're building a self-installing, self healing observability tool meant not to be opened. It has a wizard that daily sets up proper logging and an agent that investigates errors and opens PRs. Super short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFhU9Mk247M. In our earlier startups, we tried Sentry, Datadog, Grafana, Dash0, and nothing was good enough. Proper telemetry and alerting still requires a ton of manual setup. We struggled with adding good logs, so debugging was tough, especially as…

    Jun 2026 · superlog.sh · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Monitoring for websites, APIs, and cron jobs

    2024 · webgazer.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN, My name is JR and I had a need for a simple analytics solution that allowed me to store (timestamp, json) logs and run SQL over them. It was hard to find the right solution. Solutions like Mixpanel and Amplitude optimized for particular report types. Whereas solutions like Snowflake, BigQuery, etc. required a lot of setup. I built GraphJSON to fit in the middle. I strived for the ease of use of tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude, but wanted to ensure affordances were built to support use cases that big data warehouses enable. Under the hood, GraphJSON is powered by ClickHouse. This…

    2022 · graphjson.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Cronhub▲418

    Painless cron monitoring in a simple dashboard

    2018 · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Minilog▲307

    Log monitoring and real-time event alerts

    2024 · minilog.dev · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    Boostlog▲151

    A blogging platform for programmers.

    2018 · boostlog.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hey hn! I'm one of the co-founders of highlight.io, an open source monitoring tool. Today we're sharing a ClickHouse-based logging solution we've been working on. We wanted to showcase how we built it and share how you could try it out to give feedback. Since we started working on highlight.io, we've been hyper-focused on "cohesion", or ensuring that when you install your monitoring stack, all of the resources in that stack (user interactions, requests, traces, logs, etc.) are connected in a consumable way. We've written up more about our philosophy on this here [1]. We started building…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    MongoDB Analytics to track your site performance

    2020 · databaselog.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey guys, I'm building erlog to try and solve problems with logging. While trying to add logs to my application, I couldn't find any lightweight log platform which was easy to set up without adding tons of dependencies to my code, or configuring 10,000 files. ErLog is just a simple go web server which batch inserts json logs into an sqlite3 server. Through tuning sqlite3 and batching inserts, I find I can get around 8k log insertions/sec which is fast enough for small projects. This is just an MVP, and I plan to add more features once I talk to users. If anyone has any problems with…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10UE
  11. 11

    Hey everyone! I’m working on Telescope - an open-source web-based log viewer designed to make working with logs stored in ClickHouse easier and more intuitive. I wasn’t happy with existing log viewers - most of them force a specific log format, are tied to ingestion pipelines, or are just a small part of a larger platform. Others didn’t display logs the way I wanted. So I decided to build my own lightweight, flexible log viewer - one that actually fits my needs. Check it out: Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IItMOXwugY GitHub:…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12JA

    Hi HN, 8 months ago, I posted “Ask HN: I built it nobody came, what now?” and got a ton of (not very optimistic) feedback [1]. I took away 3 things: 1. The message wasn’t properly targeted 2. The onboarding experience was terrible. 3. Someone posted some advice to find leads which actually worked, yeah! So here we are. 8 months later. I unfortunately didn’t have a lot of time to put in the tool itself. But I improved the website, improved the onboarding, and got a paying customer who seems to really like the software. So here it is in its current form. Let me know what you think would make…

    2021 · jigdev.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    ROAARRR▲182

    Hey HN, I built ROAARRR because most analytics tools make it hard to get clear answers. You spend hours setting up dashboards and connecting data, but you still don’t really know what drives growth. ROAARRR brings your key data together and shows your funnel from awareness to revenue. You can track product activity, create charts for specific events, and see how changes affect retention and revenue. It’s free to try today. I’d love your feedback, especially on what feels confusing or missing.

    Nov 2025 · roaarrr.app · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Self-hosted analytics with session replays, heatmaps & more.

    2020 · 66analytics.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy.

    2019 · ackee.electerious.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    We’re the makers of Crontab.guru and Cronitor.io, both first launched on HN about a decade ago. We wanted a secure web GUI way to manage/run our own cron jobs — so we built it and open‑sourced it! With Crontab Guru Dashboard you can: * Create, update, suspend and delete your cron jobs easily * Start a job on-demand or kill running instances that are hanging around too long * Debug jobs with a local console * Use our MCP server to integrate with coding assistants like Cursor and Claude Code to configure jobs and check health/status Feedback welcome!

    2022 · crontab.guru · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    For more background and technical details, I wrote this up as well: https://dmitryfrank.com/projects/nerdlog/article

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18AB

    Hello everyone, there are many log services available and this is my attempt at a better one. Most online logging tools feature convoluted UIs, arbitrary mandatory fields, questionable AI/insights, complex pricing, etc. I hope my application fixes most of these issues. It also has some nice features, such as automatic Geo IP checks and public dashboards. Although I've created lots of software, this is my first open source application (MIT license), the tutorial for selfhosting is hopefully sufficient! Most of my development career has been with C#, NodeJS and PHP. For this project I've…

    2025 · txtlog.net · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Log and monitor your projects

    2020 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Over the past few months, we've been building Prism; a fast, developer-first observability UI that's deeply integrated with our open-source database, Parseable. Prism is designed for engineers who debug distributed systems, sometimes at odd hours, and need answers right now, without having to deal with five different tools. Backstory: We spoke to dozens of observability practitioners in large enterprises. Across the board, we heard two things: (1)The RoI on observability tools is hard to justify. (2)OSS leads to tool sprawl, metrics in Grafana, logs in ELK, traces… somewhere. We wanted a…

    2022 · parseable.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey HN. We’re Jay and Vadim from Highlight.io (https://highlight.io). We’re building an open source [1] monitoring platform for web applications. Today we’re excited to be sharing a performance tool we’ve been working on, which helps you inspect the latency of code execution from the client to the server. As engineers at past startups, we often had to debug slow queries, poor load times, inconsistent errors, etc... While tools like Jaegar [2] helped us inspect server-side performance, we had no way to tie user events to the traces we were inspecting. In other words, although we had…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Simple and effective cron job monitoring tool

    2020 · its alternatives →

  23. 23IB

    Hey HN, Some of you were really interested in Postgres logging with pgAudit in my previous post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082827 So I built this logger: https://rocketgraph.io/logger-demo using pgAudit to show you what can be done with Postgres auditing. It offers some powerful features like "get me all the CREATE queries that ran in the past hour". These are generated by AWS RDS Instance running on my Rocketgraph account. Then they are forwarded to Cloudwatch for complex querying. In the future we can connect these logs to slack so you can…

    2023 · rocketgraph.io · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hey HN We’ve been building Logdash as a lightweight observability tool for side projects and prototypes. Most logging/metrics tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK...) are amazing, but feel like overkill when you're just hacking on something small. Logdash gives you: - Real-time logs and custom metrics - Zero config (no YAML, no setup) - One tiny SDK to drop in - Hosted UI with live dashboards We use Logdash to monitor Logdash — our own prod dashboard is public here: https://logdash.io/demo-dashboard Would love feedback, ideas, or questions!

    2025 · logdash.io · its alternatives →

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