Better Stack - Observability Meets Incident Management

What it is

Better Stack is an AI-native observability and incident management platform designed for engineering and site reliability (SRE) teams. It integrates monitoring, alerting, and response tools into a single platform to help organizations detect, investigate, and resolve infrastructure and application issues. It is suited for businesses of various sizes, from indie developers to large enterprises.

Main Features

Observability & Monitoring

• Uptime Monitoring: Checks website and API availability from a global network of edge locations.
• Tracing: Provides eBPF-based, OpenTelemetry-native distributed tracing for request analysis.
• Log Management: Ingests, stores, and enables querying of log data at scale.
• Infrastructure Monitoring: Collects and visualizes metrics from servers, containers, and cloud resources.

Incident Management

• Incident Response: Facilitates declaring and managing incidents with automated workflows.
• On-call Scheduling: Manages on-call rotations and alert escalations.
• AI Incident Silencing: Uses machine learning to reduce alert noise by automatically silencing non-critical alerts.
• Status Page: Offers customizable public status pages to communicate service health to customers.

Core Capabilities

• Anomaly Detection: Triggers alerts based on statistical anomalies in metrics and logs without predefined thresholds.
• Collaboration Tools: Allows team members to comment on dashboards and incident timelines.
• Data Control: Provides options to store log data in a user's own S3 bucket for compliance and control.
• Multi-channel Alerting: Sends notifications via phone calls, SMS, Slack, and email.

How it works

Monitoring Application Health

Users configure monitors for their endpoints (HTTP, TCP, etc.). The platform checks these endpoints from multiple global locations. Upon detecting downtime or errors, it captures evidence like screenshots and traceroute outputs, then triggers alerts through configured channels like phone calls or Slack.

Investigating Performance Issues

Engineering teams use the tracing feature to visualize request flows across microservices. The bubble up investigation allows users to visually drag and drop to identify slow components. Logs and infrastructure metrics are queried alongside traces to pinpoint root causes.

Managing an Incident

When an alert is triggered, an incident is automatically declared in the system. On-call engineers are notified via their preferred channel. They can use Slack-based workflows to acknowledge, merge, or escalate incidents. Post-incident, AI-generated post-mortems provide a summary for review.

Communicating Status

Status pages are automatically updated with incident information. Subscribers receive notifications about outages and resolutions. Teams can embed custom charts showing metrics like response times directly on the public status page.

Key Points

• The platform is built on open standards like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, promoting vendor neutrality and easier integration.
• It emphasizes a significant reduction in costs compared to alternatives, claiming up to 97% savings or 33x more data ingestion for the same budget.
• AI and machine learning are core to its functionality, used for silencing noise, generating post-mortems, and planned for automated root cause analysis.
• It is designed as a unified platform, aiming to replace multiple point solutions for logging, monitoring, APM, and incident management.

Additional Details

• Pricing: Offers a free plan to start. Paid plans are usage-based for data ingestion (logs, traces, metrics) and include a flat fee for the incident management Responder license, which includes unlimited phone and SMS alerts.
• Availability: The service is hosted and available as a SaaS platform. An enterprise solution is also offered.
• Data Regions: Supports data storage in different geographic regions, including Europe.
• Future Roadmap: A feature dubbed Cursor for SREs, offering automated root cause analysis, is planned for release in Q4 2025.