Hey HN! We're Ben and Izak, the cofounders of Vigilant. Vigilant is a lightweight tool for managing structured logs. It lets you centralize your logs, search them, and create alerts.

We used Cloudwatch for logs on our last product, and it was quite painful. Even basic searches felt tedious. We’ve used dedicated observability tools at past jobs, but most of them have a steep learning curve and require widespread integration (and some still feel clunky). With Vigilant, we're focused on making logs feel fast and simple.

We operate at the application layer with an sdk. We're trying a unique optional feature that automatically reads stdout. It lets you capture existing console.log and print statements. And if you want custom log attributes, you can add them with middleware. This approach minimizes the impact on your codebase, and it's easy to understand. But it only gets application logs; still valuable, though we may need to expand to system logs later.

A while ago, we heard the team behind Cursor follows the guideline “Fast is fun.” It really resonates with us. We think it could extend to everything in the developer workflow, not just the IDE. So in our dashboard, we optimize for speed. The first page you open is your logs. We present logs like a spreadsheet, with rearrangeable columns. You can search without writing queries, and you can add filters with one click. Our queries themselves are pretty fast (Clickhouse under the hood). Though we still need to do better indexing to make searches even faster.

For background context, we actually pivoted to Vigilant. We were part of YC S23 and our original product was a webgl-based design tool and website builder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41436338. It’s dead now. Repaint had a master plan, a beautiful UI, awesome technology… and no users.

So honestly, we’re trying to avoid a big master plan with Vigilant. We’re just trying to listen and learn. We already have more users (big win!). And we’ve noticed that as we optimize the experience, they use it more. Seems like developers enjoy tools that don't disrupt their workflow. We're interested to see how far we can take that.

We’re still early and we’d love ideas and feedback. So if Vigilant seems helpful, please try it!

Website: https://vigilant.run/ Docs: https://docs.vigilant.run/ Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Kr9YR2XUqr

(Also, if you want to try spinning the square on the homepage, our record is 92 rotations)