Culture on Netdata

Our Approach to Machine Learning

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There is a lot of buzz in the world of machine learning (ML) and as a layperson it can be hard to keep up with it all. Therefore, we decided to write down some of our thoughts and musings on how we are approaching ML at Netdata.

Our Approach to Machine Learning (ML)

We’ll touch on the current state of applied ML in industry in general, and zoom in on ML in the monitoring industry. We’ll discuss how we can leverage “good honest ML” to punch above our weight and add some useful and novel features for our users over the next few years.

Investing in Netdata: a growth story

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to announce an extension to Netdata’s series A funding in the amount of $14.2M, bringing the total amount of funding to $31M. We’re thrilled to share the news; the additional funding will help us continue building the future of health monitoring and performance troubleshooting. In case you missed it, our mission is to redefine infrastructure monitoring. Our unique approach to building the right solution with and for the community is no easy task.

Netdata named to the Forbes Cloud 100 Rising Stars

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce that we’ve been named to the Forbes 2020 Cloud 100 Rising Stars. This is a list of the top 100 private cloud companies in the world, published by Forbes in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures. The 20 Rising Stars represent young, high-growth and category-leading cloud companies who are poised to join the Cloud 100 ranks. We are extremely honored to be recognized amongst our most-promising peers. This is a testament to our momentum we’ve built in partnership with our passionate community of users and contributors worldwide, as well as a validation of our community-first, open-source approach to democratizing infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting. The major milestones we’ve hit along the way this year include more than 5,000 new users added each day, more than 3 million users total worldwide, and nearly 50,000 GitHub stars, making Netdata the fourth most starred project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape. We’ve also launched our monitoring service, Netdata Cloud, which has seen very strong growth since its introduction in May, with more than 15,000 users registered so far. We couldn’t have done it without you! The Forbes 2020 Cloud 100 and 20 Rising Stars lists will also appear in the September 2020 issue of Forbes magazine.

Creating A Thriving, Agile, Remote Team

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has forced many organizations to take unprecedented steps towards remote working. As a fully distributed team, we’ve faced the common challenges of remote work. Based on our experience from our very beginning in 2018, all but a few of these organizations new to remote working will face hurdles to overcome and may try to revert to colocation as soon as possible. Remote working is hard, even when it’s carefully planned and executed. When the transition is rushed and seen as a necessary, temporary inconvenience, challenges are all but inevitable.

The Netdata Culture and People

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

There are many things I absolutely love about Netdata, but I’m most proud of our people and culture. Some words about this unique experience are long overdue.

In a career that spans over two decades and six other companies of various sizes, nothing compares to the satisfaction of working in a company like ours. My answer to the canned interview question, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years”, was always the same: I don’t care; I just want to be solving problems and working with good people, real professionals, who I can trust and respect. In retrospect, I was missing another huge part of the equation, which is to mention the kind of company I wanted to work for. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a cliche. More importantly, bad culture devours people’s souls; it sucks out any creative energy one may have, reducing engagement and, therefore, productivity. Short-term wins at the expense of company culture guarantee huge losses in the long run.

Redefining monitoring with Netdata (and how it came to be)

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

How Netdata was born

In 2013, I worked for a company that relied on financial transactions. We had a very simple SLA: complete all financial transactions within 3 seconds.

We were migrating the infrastructure from colocated (physical servers) to the cloud (VMs). The transition was not smooth. We had a lot of issues on the cloud side, which we couldn’t even detect. Business metrics were randomly reporting significant loss of volume and a very bad SLA, but at the operational level we saw no issues—everything seemed to be working perfectly. Traces were showing a large delay in several transactions, but there were no failures.