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

Posted by acrtic on Thursday March 12, 2026 @12:04AM
from the ask-hn dept.

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 :).

( 8 comments | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by theamk on Thursday March 12, 2026 @12:30AM (#47346458)

"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"?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by acrtic on Thursday March 12, 2026 @12:47AM (#47346566)

Thanks for your insight, Is there something i could implement to possibly make this stand out? Ive got around 60 visits over the past 5 days but only 1 user registered and actually tried it out. What am i missing?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by kmg_finfolio on Thursday March 12, 2026 @12:53AM (#47346609)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by acrtic on Thursday March 12, 2026 @12:57AM (#47346643)

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply, I will try to check out those communities.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by LeoLinden on Thursday March 12, 2026 @06:33PM (#47358196)

hey! I totally get this struggle - I'm just starting to try to find users for my first saas as well. I don't know the technical side of what you are building. but if you would like to talk marketing strategy with another saas founder, find me at [email protected] :). Also, not trying to sell anything here because it is free right now, but if you want to try using my SaaS to market your SaaS then please do! https://pieai.app/ - My SaaS helps founders find their first users/customers! (PS: I used my saas to find you lol)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by acrtic on Thursday March 12, 2026 @09:24PM (#47359619)

This is very fascinating, I might reach out :D.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by CoolAssPuppy on Friday March 13, 2026 @05:33AM (#47362265)

The first rule of finding distribution if you're an indie developer or a startup is to be helpful. After all, you're building a product that purports to help someone solve a problem they have.

So with that frame in mind, where do people go to ask questions or vent or get information to solve the kind of problem your product claims to solve? Don't go to those forums to just pitch yourself. First, be helpful. Offer insight and advice, or ask clarifying questions, anything to demonstrate that you are listening and can add value.

Later on, after you've provided some help, you can pitch your product. But the first thing is to be helpful. Offer some kind of wisdom or insight that is currently lacking.

I write about this in my blog post about helping indie developers get their first users: https://www.strategicnerds.com/blog/the-indie-developers-gui...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Built API monitor with root cause analysis – unab... by acrtic on Friday March 13, 2026 @06:31AM (#47362609)

Amazing blog, helped me understand what I need to do better. One issue I do have though is reddit. Initially my post was doing well over 540 views and couple of users even helped me identify core issues but after a day or so the post just got filtered for no reason and I havent been able to get reach there ever since.

[ Parent | on HN ]