Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Over the last year or so, I experimented with different ways of getting customer feedback for Checkly. This post is about what worked for us and how I was totally wrong about chat widgets.

What is the most important feature your Node.js application can have? Do you think it’s having fancy fuzzy logic for your full-text search, or maybe using sockets for real-time chats? You tell me. What’s the fanciest, most amazing and sexy feature you can add to your Node.js application?

The growing threat of attacks and data breaches on IT systems has made security monitoring more crucial now than ever before. Organizations of all sizes face risks to their data, and without the proper tools in place, a single attack could pose a severe threat to your operations.

The Internet of Things has transformed people’s lives, enabling everything from “smart homes” to remote health monitoring. And now a startup called AMMP Technologies is using IoT – and Grafana – to help bring electricity to rural Africa. Hendrik Broering, COO and cofounder of AMMP, told the audience at GrafanaCon L.A. about a village in Tanzania called Changombe, with a population of about 2,000 and no access to electricity until 2017.

Two weeks ago we released the public API for Checkly. This post is about what parts we needed to refactor, what parts we added and how we handled generating API documentation.

As industries shift to a microservices approach of deploying applications using containers, data scientists can reap the benefits. Data Scientists use specific frameworks and operating systems that can often conflict with the requirements of a production system. This has led to many clashes between IT and R&D departments. IT is not going to change the OS to meet the needs of a model that needs a specific framework that won’t run on RHEL 7.2.

In Parts One and Two of this blog, we looked back at the ongoing open source licensing wars, focusing on the evolving situation between Elastic N.V. and AWS. In this final installment, we’ll offer some opinions on the situation, as well as share our own views on how we’re reacting at Grafana Labs.

A common sentiment among our prospects after they see our demo for the first time is: “That’s it? It can’t be that simple!”. The truth is – yes it can be, and it should be. ML and AI should make IT Ops simpler, and a big part of that is usability. If your ML & AI powered IT Ops tools take months to set up and weeks to learn, and then don’t provide a substantially improved user experience, you’re obviously using the wrong tools.

This is a short follow up to last week's story on Stripe Billing as a reader on Hackernews commented that it seemed we didn't handle VAT. We do, but I just left it out of the story. For those not familiar with handling EU VAT for SaaS companies: It's a bit of counter intuitive jungle. At least that's what some dedicated SaaS startups make you believe. Also, Stripe does not handle it at all. They give you a { taxRate: null } field for you to fill.