What is our primary use case?
My main use cases for
Groundcover Observability Platform are as a monitoring tool for debugging and monitoring. I use it to review logs, check traces of API calls, and monitor servers. We use
Kubernetes, so the monitoring includes ports and the cluster itself, CPU, memory, and all related metrics.
What is most valuable?
The features of
Groundcover Observability Platform that I appreciate most include an anomaly monitor, which I haven't had much chance to use yet. They check regular logs or traces of your service when it's live, and if they detect an anomaly, such as a service producing ten errors when it usually doesn't, they flag it for investigation and deeper insight.
Another notable example with Groundcover Observability Platform is its simple search and query syntax for logs. While this isn't unique to Groundcover specifically, it's really important as our previous vendor had a very difficult-to-use navigation syntax.
What needs improvement?
I recently visited their booth and reported a bug, which they demonstrated and logged. They assured me it would be fixed by tomorrow.
Regarding future versions of Groundcover Observability Platform, they deploy new versions every Monday through rolling updates. I think we need to work on our side to better fit Groundcover, as we have situations where it's difficult to connect between different places over an entire API call, but that's our responsibility, not theirs.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Groundcover Observability Platform for a year and a few months.
What was my experience with deployment of the solution?
Though I haven't deployed Groundcover Observability Platform myself, being primarily a user, the transition to it during my time was quick and efficient. Everyone involved was very pleased. The migration went very smoothly, and we were able to deprecate the old product rather quickly.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would assess the stability and reliability of Groundcover Observability Platform as an eight out of ten. While I haven't experienced issues personally, I am aware they occasionally encounter some challenges.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Groundcover Observability Platform scales effectively with our organization's growth. We add new environments and everything works great. It scales perfectly, though we have only been using it for a year and a few months, which is a relatively small amount of time.
How are customer service and support?
I have interacted with Groundcover Observability Platform's customer support. While I personally haven't needed them often, I know others who communicate with them regularly. They are very responsive. When I reported a bug, they immediately showed interest, called someone, and got it prioritized.
I would rate Groundcover Observability Platform's customer service as a ten out of ten based on my personal experience. It was perfect.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We switched to Groundcover Observability Platform primarily because of the difficult query syntax in our previous solution. It was really annoying and tough to handle, taking considerable time to debug calls, logs, and traces. We chose Groundcover for their business model as they don't charge based on log storage, and they provide the infrastructure. It's advantageous for us pricing-wise. Additionally, from a security perspective, the data stays in-house, which wasn't the case with our previous tool.
What other advice do I have?
These issues with Groundcover Observability Platform are quick to fix. We have an SRE person at the company who works with them closely and uses Groundcover constantly. He creates amazing graphs, monitoring, and dashboards that work great. Overall, I would rate Groundcover Observability Platform eight out of ten, as I never give tens so companies know they still need to maintain their momentum.
