Dear community,
We are pleased to announce the availability of Kamon APM, a hosted APM solution built from the ground up to work nicely with Kamon and along with it we are launching a Free Starter Plan. Starting today there are no excuses for your team to say that you can’t have metrics and distributed tracing in production because, well, you can get it for free!
There are a few questions that came up while discussing this announcement with friends and coleagues so we decided to share them here in case you were wondering the same:
How will this affect the Kamon community?
The only change we expect to see is a surplus of effort and dedication to our open source instrumentation. We started Kamon years ago with the intention to help and share with the community and that intention remains unchanged. All the instrumentation we have written so far is open source and all instrumentation to come in the future will be open source as well, regardless of whether you are sending your data to Prometheus, Zipkin, Kamon APM or any other open source or commercial solution.
A key feature that people love about Kamon remains unchanged: instrument once, report anywhere.
So, you said “free starter plan”?
That is correct. Over time, we learned that the hardest part of all when it comes to monitoring is getting started and one of the ways in which we can help with this is by providing a simple way to experiment with metrics and distributed tracing with minimal effort from your side. The starter plan is aimed towards developers wanting to experiment and small teams getting started with monitoring. Sign up and get started with monitoring in a couple minutes!
What happened to Kamino?
The project that you know today as Kamon APM started off as Kamino. Back in the day we were really fixated with the idea that our open source and commercial solutions had to be completely separated from each other; it was an attempt to make sure that the community will feel safe to contribute and use our tools without thinking that there is an evil corp behind it and that you could only access the instrumentation if you pay, which was never the idea.
As it turns out, it is much simpler to just be open with people about what we are trying to do here and formalize something that is pretty obvious to us since months ago: Kamon and Kamon APM are not two different solutions but rather two sides of a bigger one.
Given that a great part of making Kamon APM an awesome tool is rooted in making all the open source instrumentation even more awesome, you can expect us to put a bunch more effort into Kamon and other open source instrumentation libraries.
That’s it for today folks, go and have fun with Kamon!
