Netdata thinks what the world lacks is a troubleshooting platform to bring real-time metrics to observability. They are building and offering it to the world for free — for now.

Netdata, the company behind the eponymous open-source, distributed, real-time, performance, and health monitoring solution for systems and applications, has announced it completed a new round of financing. Totaling $14.2 million and led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures, it brings Netdata’s total raised in Series A to $31 million.

Netdata claims it’s seeing exponential growth, citing metrics such as 50.000 Github stars, 5.000 new users and one million Docker downloads per day, and being included in the Forbes Cloud 100 Rising Stars. Founder Costas Tsaousis says it’s because Netdata is filling an unmet need:

Interestingly, Netdata does this without having a single paid service or a single paying customer so far. ZDNet connected with Tsaousis to get the whole story.

You have a pet peeve that you think nobody has adequately addressed before. So, you bite the bullet and start building your own software solution to address it. It works, and you want to share with the world, so you open source it. People like it, use it, and contribute to it, so it gets traction. The potential is there, so you want to scale it up and build a business around it.

Read the full article on ZDNet