Salesforce was the first of many SaaS-based companies to succeed and see massive growth. Since they first started out in 1999, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools have taken the IT sector and, well the world, by storm. For one, they mitigate bloatware by moving applications from the client’s computer to the cloud. Plus, the sheer ease of use brought by cloud-based, plug-and-play software solutions has transformed all sorts of sectors.

We are happy to announce that the RabbitMQ integration is available for Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform bringing together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. RabbitMQ is one of the most popular open source message brokers, used worldwide at both small startups and large enterprises. It is easy to deploy on premises and in the cloud, and supports multiple messaging protocols.

Observability is a buzzword right now. Rightly so, as many companies are greatly concerned about what’s happening with their systems. Every company has become a software company and if they aren’t, they are being disrupted by one. IT leaders have more weight on their shoulders than ever before and it’s because digitization is rapidly changing the way people consume nearly everything.

For the last several years, GitLab has run a major survey about the trends facing the DevSecOps community. This year over 4,000 people responded to the survey, 40% who identified as a Software Developer / Software Engineer. Also about half the survey participants are based in Asia, a major region for Software Developers. One of the biggest trends you will find throughout the survey is how much developers value speed and efficiency.

Prometheus was originally developed in 2012 and has grown in popularity since then. It's an open-source systems toolkit that monitors and alerts. While it was developed for SoundCloud, the project is now independent and standalone. Why would you need this model? It comes with several features, but perhaps the most important ones are the fact that it offers multiple graphing modes, dashboard support, and does not rely on distributed storage. Instead, it uses autonomous single server nodes.

PromQL is a functional query language that’s meant for use with the Prometheus monitoring tool. In fact, PromQL is short for “Prometheus Query Language.” The point of this language is to make it easy for users to choose and collect time-series data in Prometheus, which can then be displayed in a graph or as tabular data in the browser for this tool. Get a free trial with MetricFire and start visualizing your data.

Bill Gates was quoted saying, “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.” Workflow automation is one of the finest methods deployed to succeed in business. It is considered the ultimate alternative to traditional inefficient and time-consuming business processes. The objective of a business is to reduce operational costs while ROI increases.

With so many brands and competitors out there, customers have an extremely high expectation for your customer service and care. Having a great customer experience (CX) team helps with client satisfaction, retention, and referral. All three of these are at the bottom of the marketing funnel and are key to growing your business. To truly understand your customers’ expectations, you must diligently study your CX and pain points.

Welcome to the first edition of Open Source Matters: our regular publication about the latest happenings in open source! Let’s dive into the news.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this May. We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.