HashiCorp Consul vs. Kissmetrics

Consul looks to me like an amazing solution to store configuration data. In huge cloud environments like what we are using nowadays, it is quite important to have a reliable source of parameters to our distributed applications, easily scalable and also, easy to change parameters spreading them efficiently over our entire environment.

Incentivized

[Kissmetrics is well suited for the] abandon cart scenario to re-engage users on the purchase journey. Engaging users to personalized content using the visit metrics derived from the data captured at each digital touch points. [Implementing] website campaign and journey orchestration is easy. You get visitor profile to segment upon using different visit metrics and action.

Incentivized

• Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
• K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
• API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
• Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.

Incentivized

• Kissmetrics has a fantastic dashboard where you can see all relevant metrics immediately after login.
• Kissmetrics was extremely easy to implement in our site and it works across different platforms.
• After the initial setup, managing and creating new events to track is super simple.
• You can monitor live usage. This feature allows you to monitor user interactions as they are happening and as events you are tracking are triggered. You can see exactly what users are doing real time, which is really a very cool feature. At the time, this kind of realtime monitoring was not possible with Google Analytics.

• Error logs - some of the errors require Googling as you have no idea what they mean
• Misconfiguration is painful - strange errors can occur if you make even a tiny mistake

Incentivized

• The biggest issue, is that I have lost faith in the accuracy of the data.
• There have been a few examples of the system producing what looks like spurious data. I triangulate the data using Google Analytics, and on a few occasions, there have been very wide discrepancies that indicate a potentially serious problem. For example, Google might indicate 1,000 page views, while KISSmetrics indicates 5,000.. This is not a constant problem, but it has happened enough where my faith in the data is shaken.
• It really doesn't matter how good the front-end functionality is if my faith in data accuracy is not 100%.
• A/B testing is much more difficult than it needs to be. It is possible to structure the product to enable A/B testing, but this involves reading a bunch of help files and writing some code. I would have expected this to work out-of-the-box. In Google Analytics, for example.you only have to enter two URLs and then it works. This was a surprise.

I used KISSmetrics on a daily basis whilst a summer analyst at a language-learning software startup company called Voxy. To my knowledge, the company continued to use KISSmetrics. I am no longer at Voxy but we were pleased with KISSmetrics.

Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.

Incentivized

For basic operations, the product is relatively user-friendly, considering how complicated a topic data and analytics can be. The engineering integration work is very straightforward, and building standard report types is pretty easy. However, there were a few rough spots. Event mapping and some of the deeper account settings are not well explained. And the Power Reports functionality is just utterly, impossibly confusing

In a year, we had trouble logging-in just once. But even then all tracking data was later available once the site came back up. also, the system down notices were very informative - they explained the reason for the downtime and were constantly updated with progress in getting the problem resolved.

Speed improved dramatically as the service matured. Early iterations of the publicly-released application would occasionally provide slow processing of results, but those delays became much rarer occurrences during the last year that we used KISSmetrics. One of the more impressive views (which started out feeling more like a toy) is the live view of visits. Knowing that you could see, in real time, what events a user triggered, was gratifying and instructive.

I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.

Incentivized

Everytime that I've needed or contacted support, I've received a quick response and timely help! There was even a major issue we had with connecting Unbounce into Kissmetrics. They brought in multiple people and worked with us for hours to make sure we could figure out the issue and get everything running! I have no complaints about the support team!

Incentivized

Again, we were fortunate to work with KISSmetrics as they built their application, but Hiten, their CEO and founder, was incredibly helpful to me personally, and to our metrics-driven business as a whole, as we adopted their tool.

I loved this aspect of the product. It wasn't just that the documentation and online tutorials are great - which they are - the on-boarding process though was really stellar. Once you have set everything up, you get a welcome message followed by a step-by-step guide to get you started that is built right into the product interface. For example, the UI asks you to first do X, and then copy this code snippet and send it to your developer who will know what to do with it. When you come back after the first interaction with the product, it continues the process by explaining right in the UI how to track events etc. This kind of step-by-step approach is incredibly efficient. Although there are various forms of supporting documentation (PDFs videos etc) to support every step, you don't really need them. This approach means that you are up and running very quickly with virtually no training time or documentation consultation. Highly efficient process.

In order to build trackability down to revenue, there was quite a lot of work to integrate Kissmetrics with our software and internal process. We had to build the hooks so that Kissmetrics could call back into our software and billing system, etc.. However, we didn't need additional expertise to do this. Once you understand the API, and you own systems, making it work is not too difficult. We did not require an outside consultant or anything like that

We used to use Microsoft SQL Server for configuration management of our services. Unfortunately that was a pain because of:

• Developers did not know how to persist objects effectively in MS SQL Server
• SQL queries or a custom web UI were the ways of keeping the data up to date, but both options were hard to use
• Each service would have its own slightly different configuration in a file and in MS SQL Server so that caused a lot of confusion and configuration management overhead

Consul brought the following benefits:

• Its own modern web UI
• Streamlined use of objects and multiple different configuration (JSON-based)
• Service DNS vs IP addresses is a God-send for the dev and operations teams.

Incentivized

It has been a while since I demoed Heap and Optimizely but the main points that stick out in my head are that Kissmetrics had more transparent and cheaper pricing. Kissmetrics offered all the same functionality, and at least from my personal experience, the staff at Kissmetrics was easier to work with and nicer to interact with.

Incentivized

• It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
• Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
• For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.

Incentivized

• Improved product
• More insights into users
• More insights into marketing channels and their performance
• Must admit that the live stream was a little bit addictive the first couple of weeks, but it's a necessary evil when you launch new features :)