Today I am very thankful to use the netdata tool to monitor few Kubernetes clusters (https://www.netdata.cloud/). It's a free, open-source on GitHub and useful product. They have wonderful UIs, great quality of code, high performance.
The main issue, as with many open-source projects, is that they have no business model, not event a premium service, and yet they were able to leverage 20M$ from Bain Capital Ventures and Marathon Venture Capital. Considering these funds religiously capitalist, I can't imagine them suddenly having an interest in IT innovation or any altruistic concern to help the rest of the world. At the end, this is a monitoring tool doing the same as its well-established open-source competitors (like prometheus and grafana), therefore, the industry didn't need another monitoring tool.
Is there any business model I don't see? Is it a form of whitewashing, or a simple marketing operation intending to give them more credit and attractiveness? Or, have these VCs really become angels?
-- T. Webber
"In addition to the open-source version of the product, there is a SaaS version, which also has what he calls a “massively free plan.” He says the open-source monitoring agent is “a gift to the world.” The SaaS tool is about democratizing monitoring and the pay version is even different from most monitoring tools, charging by the seat instead of by the amount of infrastructure you are monitoring."