This is the 25th year of the Open Source movement, and as with any social enterprise there is a constant effort to maintain and at times renegotiate the meaning of terms and the values behind them. Open Source is a child of the Free Software movement. It uncritically inherited its values and philosophy from its parent, but are those still sufficient today?
Before we do a detailed dive into what Prometheus and Datadog are, let's look at the key comparison points. Both Prometheus and Datadog are monitoring tools, but Prometheus is open source and Datadog is proprietary. Prometheus is the de facto tool for monitoring time-series for Kubernetes, and Datadog is an all-around APM, logs, time-series, and tracing tool.
Whenever you use open source software, you benefit from the community that surrounds it — whether it’s a bug fix, better documentation, a helpful tutorial or something else. We at Grafana Labs benefit from the open source community, too: from your participation, and the many OSS components we use in the development of Grafana itself. But what makes an open source community successful, exactly? And how do you build and nurture one?
At the recent KubeCon EU, we learned the significant news of the FluentBit v2.0 major release with numerous new features. What’s new and what’s to come for this key log aggregation tool? On the latest OpenObservability Talks, I hosted Eduardo Silva, one of the maintainers of Fluentd, a creator of Fluent Bit and co-founder of Calyptia.
For nearly a decade, Logz.io has offered a proven pathway for organizations using the world’s most popular open source tools to monitor and analyze their cloud systems—allowing them to enlist a far more efficient and cost-effective approach.
When we launched Pyroscope in 2021, we had one clear goal: Give developers a powerful open source continuous profiling tool for collecting, storing, and analyzing profiling data. Grafana Labs had a similar goal when they released Grafana Phlare, a horizontally scalable, highly available open source profiling solution inspired by databases like Grafana Loki, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo.
As you’d imagine, generative AI has been a huge topic here at Grafana Labs. We’re excited about its potential role in bridging the gap between people and the beyond-human scale of observability data we work with every day. We’ve also been talking a lot about where open source fits in — especially if that Google researcher is right and OSS will outcompete OpenAI and friends. What role can we play to bring the community along?
We are excited to announce the publication of our 2023 State of Calico Open Source, Usage & Adoption report! The report compiles survey results from more than 1,200 Calico Open Source users from around the world, who are actively using Calico in their container and Kubernetes environments. It sheds light on how they are using Calico across various environments, while also highlighting different aspects of Calico’s adoption in terms of platforms, data planes, and policies.
The dev world was on fire this weekend, as news of yet another major open-source project was revealed to be in the midst of an identity crisis. The unsettling trend is clear: hit a certain adoption threshold, and then swap the licensing in an attempt to turn dedicated fans into revenue streams. With more companies searching for a sustainable business model and attempting to appease shareholders, the only certainty we have is, what was free yesterday, might be paid tomorrow.
When you plan monitoring strategies, the first thing you need to consider is the characteristics of the target systems. Depending on the resources you want to monitor, you will have to apply different architectural designs such as data collection, metrics generation, visualization, refresh schedule, and more. When you want to monitor network systems, making these considerations will allow you to achieve the right monitoring solutions.
