When I started Checkly, all the typical SaaS things around billing, credit cards and prorating confused the hell out of me. I understood them from an intellectual point of view, but not really from an implementation point of view.

Open source software adoption continues to grow within enterprises (even for legacy applications), beyond just startups and born-in-the-cloud software. In this second part of our Kafka monitoring series (see the first part discussing Kafka metrics to monitor), we’ll take a look at some open source tools available to monitor Kafka clusters. We’ll explore what it takes to install, configure, and actually use each tool in a meaningful way.

If you run a SaaS, you probably want to show your users when they are almost running out of widgets. Or that they can get some cool feature on a more expensive plan. Or, in other words, how can you be nice and commercial in dealing with plan limits. Last week we already looked at how we manage plans & features for Checkly. That write up was very back end focused, so this week I wanted to dive deeper into how we actually show this to our users in a friendly way.

Where we left off: AWS had taken the Elasticsearch software and launched their own cloud offering in 2015, and Elastic N.V. had doubled down on an “open core strategy.” Once AWS decides to offer a project like Elasticsearch, it immediately becomes a truly formidable competitor to anyone trying to do the same, even the company behind the software itself. AWS has huge scale, operational expertise, and various network effects that really compound.

As mobile and IoT deployments play an increasing role in enterprise networks, organizations are looking to more appropriate architecture—such as edge computing—to relieve their security and device management burdens. Edge computing is still in its relative infancy, and the platforms and services needed to orchestrate edge deployments are evolving themselves. In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the issues and available options.

How do you deal with what a user can do on their account in a SaaS app? Can Jane on the "Starter" plan create another widget when she is near the limit of her plan? What if she's a trial user?

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.

In the following example-driven tutorial we will learn how to use Prometheus metrics / OpenMetrics to instrument your code whether you are using Golang, Java, Python or Javascript. We will cover the different metric types and provide readily executable code snippets. Prometheus is an open source time series database for monitoring that was originally developed at SoundCloud before being released as an open source project.