HACKER Q&A
📣 acrtic

Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unable to find first users


I'm a CS student at PES University and over the last few months I built Pulse, a free API uptime monitor. I wanted to share what I built and genuinely ask for advice on distribution because I'm stuck.

I wasn't happy with how existing free monitors handle incidents. They tell you something is down but give you nothing to debug with. So I focused on making Pulse actually useful after an alert fires.

What I built:

Root cause analysis — breaks every failed request into DNS lookup, TCP connect, TLS handshake, and TTFB stages, compares each against the historical baseline, and tells you which stage failed with a confidence score and plain-English suggestion.

Health scoring — 0-100 score per monitor based on uptime, response time trends, and variance. Lets you see degradation happening before actual downtime.

Anomaly detection — warns when response time is consistently 2x the 7-day baseline across 3 consecutive pings.

Auto incident reports — generates a post-mortem after every recovery with timeline, response time comparison, and impact estimate.

Rich alerts — Discord, Slack, and push notifications include status code, response time at failure, and a direct link to the incident.

All free, 5 monitors, no credit card.

The problem: I've posted on Reddit but my account keeps getting filtered. I have zero users outside of people I know personally. I don't have a marketing budget and I'm not sure where developers who actually care about monitoring hang out.

Specific questions I'm stuck on: - Is the root cause analysis angle actually a meaningful differentiator or is it a nice-to-have? - Where would you go to find devops engineers or backend developers who would genuinely care about this? - Is free-with-Pro-coming the right model or does free just attract people who will never pay?

Any honest feedback appreciated, including if the product itself has obvious problems I'm not seeing. Link to my project in my about me, or just ask in comments :).

  👤 kmg_finfolio Accepted Answer ✓
Root cause analysis is a real differentiator but only if your users have already felt the pain of staring at a vague alert at 2am. The question is whether you're reaching those people. On where to find them: not Reddit. Try posting in Discord servers for specific frameworks (Laravel, Rails, Node communities). Backend devs who care about uptime hang out there and talk shop. Also, open source maintainers on GitHub who run their own infra are a great early segment — they feel every downtime personally. On free vs paid: I'm building a SaaS too and went through this exact question. Free works if it creates a habit that paid unlocks. Your auto incident reports feel like the right paid gate that's the thing a team lead needs to show their manager. The monitoring itself is a personal pain point; the report is an organizational one. One thing I'd add: you're asking if RCA is a differentiator, but from the outside it reads as a feature list. The real question is — what does someone search for the moment before they'd want your product? That search intent is your distribution.
👤 theamk
"Root cause analysis" is pretty complex, and DNS + TCP + TLS are just a tiny bits of it (and they are one of the most reliable ones too, as those components are written once and then typically never touched).

When I do root analysis, I look into internal logs, server metrics, recent source code changes, and related systems. I am sure this can be partially automated, but this is a lot of work.

An API monitor that can only tell me "You have elevated first-byte latency and increased 5xx rate" is pretty useless, and I certainly don't think it can offer me any "plain-english suggestion" for this problem. What is it going to tell me, "git gud and fix your servers"?