By Costa Tsaousis, CEO and founder of Netdata
For years, organizations have struggled with
bringing their procedures up to speed with the "cloud way" only to find their
resources and allocated dollars drained in the search of effective monitoring.
Not too long ago, I was on that same boat. As
a tech industry veteran, I understand the struggles that come with this
daunting task. I've experienced the pains of migrating infrastructure from
collocated to the cloud and have come face-to-face with the lack of visibility
that made it impossible to troubleshoot operational issues my team and I
encountered during this process. Not to mention, the frustration of investing
in multiple monitoring solutions that simply did not work.
This frustration led me to create my company,
Netdata, with one goal in mind: to democratize monitoring. I spent all of my
free time, including nights and weekends, developing a solution to help
sysadmins, developers, DevOps engineers, and IT managers customize their
monitoring infrastructure, while troubleshooting issues often faced on the
cloud and on-prem infrastructure. I needed to make sure that the solution was
easy to install, gave end-users access to unlimited metrics, provided real-time
monitoring, and included preconfigured dynamic dashboards that were designed
specifically for troubleshooting.
And when it came time to launch, I decided to
take the unconventional path of releasing Netdata as an open source software
rather than an enterprise solution. Here's what led me to this decision and why
you should consider it too:
The
Open Source Community
When I first launched Netdata, I used Reddit
and GitHub as a stepping stone. Within hours of releasing it on GitHub, it went
viral. Hundreds of people all over the world started using it, sharing feedback
by opening dozens of GitHub issues. The project reached 10,000 stars on GitHub
in a couple of weeks! The more Netdata received feedback from the open source
community, the more this empowered me to continue building a solution to
simplify the lives of those who needed it the most. The open source community
is a great way to explore new ideas from hundreds of contributors you know who
are genuinely interested in your product and committed to making it
better.
Open
Source Offers Quicker Growth
Building a product for and with the community
is fundamental. It's important to put end-users first, which is why we built a
free, open-source monitoring agent that is the best single-node monitoring
system you can find. This is a gift to the world - open technology and free
software.
Open source software is a great model if you
want rapid, scalable development. Our collaboration through tools like open
repositories on GitHub engages a global community of contributors, widening the
talent pool and expertise.
In conclusion, the decision to release Netdata
as an open source software has seen tremendous success for both the company and
its end-users. The open source community has been nothing short of
inspirational while working alongside our hundreds of contributors to make
Netdata better. Netdata has 48K stars on GitHub to-date and nearly employs 50
people, mostly engineers, to help the growing demand for a solution that helps
people properly monitor their infrastructure. While open source may have its
disadvantages, its advantages will always outweigh them.
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About the Author
Costa Tsaousis is the founder and CEO of
Netdata, an innovative real-time performance monitoring solution for
infrastructures of all sizes. He is working with the Netdata team to build both
a robust monitoring agent with an engaged open-source community and a
complementary SaaS application that helps enterprises manage their Cloud
infrastructure, at scale.
Before Netdata, Costa worked for 25 years
in the online IT services industry, assisting disruptors become challengers
using technology. Costa is also the original developer behind FireHOL, a
"firewall for humans" that builds secure, stateful firewalls from
easy-to-understand, human-readable configurations.