Famed management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Tracking and analyzing data of a system provides metrics to measure, predict, and improve the underlining health of the system. Logging data is the simplest act of collecting data for measurement and plays an important role in modern enterprises, as it provides a way to measure the health of hardware devices and software applications alike.

The emergence of a new breed of commercial open source company, challenging the dominance of public cloud, has set off a licensing war that calls into question the very meaning of open source. We debated this topic at last month’s GrafanaCon Los Angeles, where I participated in a spirited panel. Since then, the battle lines have been redrawn. Last week, Amazon announced its Open Distribution for Elasticsearch. And MongoDB Inc. abandoned OSI approval of its new SSPL license.

When I was a kid, we would head to the city to buy things, everything from a pair of shoes to new school supplies. As I grew up in the 1990s, we were introduced to a new way of shopping: malls. They were easier, the variety was bigger, and the lights were brighter. With that, our habit of street shopping mostly “died.” Over the past few years, retail has been rattled by another development: online shopping, which, according to all indications, is now killing the mall.

Despite being one of the most important factors that affect online businesses today, downtime is also often one of the most overlooked. Many organizations realize that downtime results in immediate money loss, customer satisfaction and employee productivity, yet fail to employ measures that will efficiently prevent it and reduce it.

The rest of the city may still have been in a post-Oscars haze, but over 350 monitoring mavens gathered in downtown L.A. bright and early on Feb. 25 to kick off GrafanaCon 2019. The next two days were filled with 40+ talks, including Grafana end user stories from companies like Bloomberg and Tinder.