June 2023 Summaries

Observability, a concept introduced by Rudolf E. Kálmán in 1960 for aerospace and industrial systems, has been adapted for modern software systems to help developers understand internal states through external outputs like logs, metrics, and traces. As software complexity and user diversity have increased, developers have needed tools that can capture unexpected behaviors in live systems, leading to the development of platforms like Honeycomb, Dynatrace, and Axiom. However, the term "Observability" has been diluted by companies offering legacy monitoring tools that rely on sampling and filtering, which limits the ability to detect unforeseen issues. Axiom aims to address this by providing a logging system that centralizes 100% of event data, offering full visibility without the compromises seen in other monitoring solutions, and inviting developers to explore their pricing plans to achieve true Observability.

Axiom has introduced a new tracing interface that allows for rapid and comprehensive tracing across all events within an infrastructure, responding to customer demand for enhanced visibility into microservices communication. The tool, built into Axiom and utilizing the OpenTelemetry framework, eliminates the need for additional setup and enables full-speed trace analysis directly on Axiom data. The interface is designed with simplicity in mind, featuring a user-friendly UI resembling Chrome's network panel, complete with a waterfall view for trace inspection. It includes features such as hierarchical span representation, visualization of temporal anomalies, and error highlighting, which facilitate easy exploration and navigation of traces. This new capability offers teams complete visibility across applications and services, enhancing their ability to monitor and understand their operational environments.

Axiom, co-founded by Neil Jagdish Patel, was established to address the high costs and complexities of traditional log management tools that were originally designed for physical servers and inadequately adapted to the cloud environment. Unlike legacy systems, Axiom has been architected from the ground up to optimize event data ingestion, storage, and querying for cloud performance and efficiency, allowing it to offer full-featured event management at significantly lower prices. The company emphasizes transparent, usage-based pricing without hidden fees, daily limits, or unexpected charges, making it easier for customers to budget annually with confidence. Axiom is committed to avoiding practices that frustrate users of other software vendors, such as complex pricing structures and forced upgrades, and offers accessible, straightforward plans for personal, team, and enterprise use.

Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization, now offers a new data source plugin that allows users to integrate and analyze Axiom event data within Grafana. This plugin enables storing event data in Axiom's scalable cloud-native datastore and using Grafana Explore for querying and dashboard creation. Available as a commercially signed plugin in Grafana's catalog, it uses Axiom’s official Go bindings for efficient event retrieval. Users can install the plugin on Grafana Cloud or local instances, requiring an Axiom Personal Token and organization ID for setup. The plugin facilitates the creation of dashboards with various panel options and supports Grafana Alerting for event changes. Axiom’s APL query language enhances data exploration in Grafana Explore, with schema completion and syntax highlighting features. The integration aims to provide Application Developers and Platform Engineers with a robust tool for monitoring and troubleshooting applications using Axiom's high-performance event datastore.