A distinctive Better Stack review to clearly define all its incredible features. Explore this powerful and intuitive tool for spotting, resolving, monitoring server status, and preventing downtime:
Better Stack, being an affordable yet feature-loaded and intuitive platform, is quite popular among businesses for incident management, job scheduling, log management, alerting, uptime monitoring, and more uses. Enterprises and developers from across the globe rely on Better Stack for scaling, staying secure and compliant, and optimizing tech spend.
Some of the world’s best teams, like Decathlon, UNICEF, Accenture, Raspberry Pi, and the Government of Canada, trust the platform.
Table of Contents:
Understanding Better Stack: Hands-On Review
For infrastructure management, troubleshooting, and data visualization, I would say Better Stack is one of the most popular and reliable platforms. Better Stack helps respond to incidents or system failures as soon as possible to restore normal operations. The incidents can be any form, like a quality degradation or a complete system failure.
Why do Businesses Need an Incident Management Solution
Studies have proven that service outages or business downtime can cause significant losses to a business. Incident management solutions help businesses overcome these problems.
They benefit businesses in many ways, for example:
- They help in finding and resolving issues quickly.
- The suitable person can be notified as soon as possible.
- You can collaborate with your team to solve them.
- Learning about past incidents helps you understand their causes.
Better Stack has appreciable on-call scheduling tools and gives competition to the leading job schedulers like JAMS Scheduler, Tidal, and Hyperping; but lacks some of the advanced scheduling tools, like event-driven job scheduling.
Get Started With Incident Monitoring
Better Stack allows you to create monitors. Creating a monitor enables you to automatically check the uptime and performance of a website or an application.
The process of creating a monitor includes setting up an HTTP status code that checks the URLs every X seconds for an HTTP success status code (2XX). If the success code does not return, the system creates an incident and sends an alert to the scheduled on-call person. If the on-call individual cannot reply, the alert will be dispatched to the entire team.
Follow these steps to create a monitor:
- Go to ‘Monitors’.
- Click on ‘Create monitor’.
- Enter the URL or the IP address in the ‘URL to monitor’ text bar.
- Choose the alerting option- phone call / SMS / Email / Mobile app push notification / Slack, Microsoft Teams, or other alerting integration.
- Choose the escalation options. You can schedule on-call team members who will be alerted whenever an incident is spotted. Then set up escalation policies, as per the requirements. Watch this reel to learn more about on-call scheduling.
- Now click on ‘Create monitor’.
From now on, the system will monitor the created URL.
Watch this short YouTube reel explaining how to create a monitor and an alert.
Features
Better Stack has an impressive set of features. It allows its users to manage logs, monitor websites and uptime, manage incidents, and more.
Have a look at its features to know why it is one of our top choices:
#1) Logs Management: With Better Stack, your team can view all logs, debug issues, and resolve incidents quickly. All the logs are kept as structured data (JSON format) and you can search up to 1 billion log lines in a second. Then, with their collaborative dashboards, you can resolve issues faster.
#2) Alerting: Better Stack sends instant notifications on detecting an irregularity or anomaly before it causes an issue. Customize the alerting setup according to your needs to minimize false positives. Better Stack sends alerts through voice calls, SMS, e-mail, Slack, Teams, and push notifications.
#3) Scheduling on-call duties: You will get tools for assigning on-call duties as well as creating escalation policies. You can then post all incident updates to a private status page.
#4) Uptime Monitoring: Better Stack performs quick 30-second checks for monitoring your web page, API, ping, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, DNS, or generic network, and sends screenshots of detecting an error. It verifies each incident from at least 3 locations to minimize false positives.
#5) Incident Management: Better Stack’s incident management tools range from 24 to 7 monitoring, alerting, and on-call scheduling to maintaining a second-by-second incident timeline, where you will get all information about how the incident developed.
#6) Integrations: You will get several useful integrations for extending and automating workflows.
Some integrations they offer are:
- Python
- Ruby & Rails
- Java
- Heroku
- MySQL
- Syslog
- Vector
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft Azure
- Datadog
- Grafana
- Google Calendar
- Microsoft Outlook
- Android
- iOS
- PagerDuty
- Splunk On-Call
- Slack
- Zendesk
- Asana
- Jira
- Zapier
- and more.
#7) Dashboards: Better Stack offers readymade dashboards for viewing all of your logs and metrics. You will also get team collaboration tools on the dashboard so that you can work together to solve incidents.
#8) Security and compliance: Better Stack is a SOC2 Type 2 and GDPR-compliant platform. It has built-in data encryption (for data-at-rest and data-in-motion), automated backup, and SSO/SAML sign-in tools for data security.
It also helps organizations stay compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and SOC 2 Type 2 audits. You can get in touch with their security team (email- security@betterstack.com) if you have more security concerns.
Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| • Quick installation • Flexible pricing • Helps businesses scale securely • A number of useful integrations • A 60-day money back guarantee for all plans • A free plan • Beautiful dashboards • Beginner-friendly platform • Performs multi-location checks for minimising false positives. | • Better Stack is currently not HIPAA compliant. • Their mobile app lacks some basic features. |
Migration Process
Better Stack offers support for streamlining consolidation and technical migration, thus making exporting and importing critical data to Better Stack trouble-free and smooth.
They also offer team onboarding support through customizable and fully remote online training workshops for even the less technical team members. While migrating, you can import monitors in bulk to Better Stack.
Use these guiding steps to achieve your goal:
- Go to ‘Create Monitor’.
- Click on ‘You can import multiple monitors here’ (which is below the ‘URL to monitor’ field).
- Now you can write or just paste all the URLs that you want to import for monitoring (there should be a single URL in a line)
- Edit configurations as required.
- Click on ‘Create Monitors’.
Pricing
Price plans for the Log management version include Log aggregation, alerting, collaboration, insights & analysis, integrations, and security features.
- Free: $0 per month
- Freelancer: $25 per month
- Small Team: $85 per month
- Business: $170 per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
(Please note that this version of Better Stack offers one-click integration with Better Stack Uptime’s Incident management.)
Price plans are available for the Uptime monitoring version, which includes Alerting, Incident management, Uptime monitoring, Status pages, Integrations, Reporting & Analytics, and Security features.
- Basic: $0 per month
- Freelancer: $25 per month
- Small Team: $85 per month
- Business: $170 per month per team
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does BetterStack do?
In simple words, Better Stack notifies your teams whenever it detects an irregularity that can cause issues. It continuously monitors your infrastructure and sends screenshots and error logs to the allowed person, so that incidents can be identified and resolved quickly.
2. Is Better Stack free?
Yes, Better Stack has a $0 per month plan that offers 10 monitors, 3-minute checks, email alerts, and 5 status pages.
Their paid plans are available at reasonable costs. Plus, you’ll get a 60-day money-back guarantee with each plan.
3. What are the 5 key areas of incident management?
The incident management process involves the following key areas:
Continuous infrastructure monitoring and incident identification
Sending instant alerts to the authorized person
Incident logging
Incident categorization and prioritization
Incident Remediation
4. How to do uptime monitoring?
You can use Better Stack for uptime monitoring. Their fast, 30-second checks find incidents and take screenshots so that you can easily find the gaps and work on them.
5. Where is Better Stack company located?
Better Stack has its headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic. Founded in 2021, the company has 25+ employees and has raised over $28.6 million in funding to date.
Conclusion
How valuable is Better Stack for businesses of different types?
Better Stack is known for the ease of use it delivers to even non-technical users. Plus, its wide range of integrations, collaboration tools, security features, top-quality support, and other important and highly useful tools make it stand apart.
If you search for the top Log Management tools, Website Management tools, Application Performance Monitoring tools, Observability tools, or the most popular Incident Management tools, it’s most probable that you will find Better Stack in the list.
They have different price plans for different users, individuals, freelancers, small businesses, and big enterprises. This makes the platform recommendable for organizations of all sizes.
Our Rating
Better Stack 2024 Review: The Best Incident Management Software
An extensive review of Better Stack Incident Monitoring Solution with features and pricing. Discover all about this excellent tool from this in-depth review.
Price: 25
Price Currency: $
Operating System: Ubuntu
Application Category: SecurityApplication
5
Pros
- Quick installation
- Flexible Pricing
- Helps businesses scale securely
- Several useful integrations
- Beautiful dashboards
- User-friendly platform for beginners
- Performs multi-location checks for minimizing false positives
Cons
- Currently not HIPAA compliant
- Their mobile app lacks some basic features.
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