As I was working in the early and mid 2000s in the database space, there was Oracle which was a “big bad wolf”,
having a very close grip on their customers and not hesitating to squeeze more juice from them at every opportunity.
This, of course, was bad for innovation as we had been getting more and more data to store in process, in many cases it was prohibitively costly to do, thanks to Oracle.
When there is a pain, alternatives tend to arise, MySQL and PostgreSQL were born to underpin “Web 2.0”
allowing companies like Facebook or Twitter to store and process data much more cost effectively
than was ever possible with Proprietary solutions.
As I look at Observability space, I’m having “de ja vu” with the relation industry is having with Datadog.
There are a fair amount of scary stories on the internet about obscene observability bills.
These days Observability is well understood as a mission critical function, where if you want to keep your application up,
performing and secure you need to have great observability, which is a good thing.
Yet, for many this level of “good observability” remains unreachable, because it is just too damn expensive.
Over the years I spoke to countless folks which have to limit their Observability, either not monitoring all nodes
and services or drastically filtering logs and tracing they store, to fit their bill,
rather than being able to get observability they want to have.
The good news, same as with Databases a couple of decades ago, is that the true Open Source revolution
is coming to the Observability space. There are already many Open Source observability building blocks -
Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry(OTEL) among others, yet complete observability platforms such as Datadog,
Dynatrace or New Relic remain mostly proprietary and very expensive.
Yet things are changing - over the last few years we have seen a number of Open Source (Open Core) Observability startups
striving to become Open Source alternatives to DataDog.
Signoz,
NetData
and of course Coroot are among the companies working to make it happen.
In the next 5 years I’m expecting Open Source observability platforms to become a lot more mature
and take a significant portion of the market and what is even more important is -
empower even more Developers to have Observability they want and deserve without breaking the bank!