Costa Tsaousis presented in the Observability Devroom at FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels, starting at 16:30. The talk covered the journey of Netdata – how it started, the architectural decisions that shaped it, and the challenges of building a distributed monitoring system in the open.
FOSDEM is not a vendor event. The audience is developers and maintainers who care about how things work, not how they are marketed. Costa’s talk leaned into that: the early design goal of per-second granularity, the choice to run everything at the edge rather than relying on a centralized backend, and the ongoing tension between keeping the project simple for individual users while scaling it for organizations with thousands of nodes.
He also talked about building in public – what it means when your users can read every commit, file issues against your architecture, and fork your project if they disagree with your direction. For an open-source monitoring tool, that transparency is both an advantage and a constraint. FOSDEM, as the world’s largest free and open-source software conference, was the right place to have that conversation.
