Orbital

About

Riverbed links every outbound request to the exact call site in your source, including through async boundaries. Open a slow trace and you land on the function that caused it.

Where Orbital fits

Orbital sits in the analytics corner of most stacks, and is aimed at teams who have outgrown doing this part by hand. It runs on Web and CLI, and is a paid product.

It is a closed-source product, so evaluate it the way you would any vendor you plan to build a workflow around.

What you get on day one

Call-site attribution through async chains, and source-mapped stack traces in production, waterfall view with dependency grouping, one-line sdk install. The setup is deliberately small: the maker's argument is that a tool you have to schedule a migration for is a tool you will not adopt.

Whether that holds for your team depends on what you already run. The listing below and the feedback from other makers are the fastest way to find out.

What it does

• Call-site attribution through async chains
• Source-mapped stack traces in production
• Waterfall view with dependency grouping
• One-line SDK install

• Mara Ellis @maraellis · 2d

  Been using this on a 40-table schema all week. The rollback generation alone saved me twice. One request: a dry-run flag that prints the SQL without touching anything.

• Devin Roy @droy · 3d

  The plain-language summaries are the killer feature. My non-technical PM can review migrations now, which I did not expect to ever type.

• Sana Qureshi @sanaq · 4d

  Works well with Postgres. MySQL support felt a bit behind, the enum diffing missed a case for me. Filed an issue and got a response the same day.