Why StackState Loves Open-Source Software

Profile Martin van Vliet

Martin van Vliet

2 min read

Open-source software started around the millennium and is now one of the cornerstones of modern software development. Open-source projects make their source code available to anyone so that engineers across the world can inspect the code to find bugs or make changes to suit their needs. Today, there are more than 180,000 open-source projects available, according to Wikipedia. We at StackState are big believers in open-source software. Open-source software allows us to build on top of well-tested, battle-hardened code in use by millions of people worldwide. Read further to discover what StackState has to offer related to open-source!

Why open-source?

Our engineers love open-source software! You can inspect the source code and spot potential problems in the code if you are working with open-source software. Furthermore, if the library you are using does 90% of the job you need, you can dive in and add your additional 10% yourself. The same goes for any other engineer who finds the software valuable. You can benefit from the contributions of engineers around the world. Together we make every project better. This collaboration has a powerful effect on the evolution of the final product.

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Our history with open-source

StackState has a long history of building on and contributing to open-source software. Our product uses many accessible open-source components that allowed us to jumpstart our development: HBaseKafkaElasticSearchakka, and react, to name a few. We have contributed many bug fixes back to these projects in the course of building our observability platform.

We have also open-sourced parts of our product and shared the improvements we’ve made: the StackState agent and agent integrations (building upon other open-source software, in the true spirit of open-source) are the most prominent example of that.

Open-source today and in the future: StackPacks

Now, we are also starting to open-source our plugins, which we call StackPacks. StackPacks combine StackState configuration and integration code and allow StackState to build its real-time, always up-to-date map of your IT landscape. We hope that open-sourcing these StackPacks will serve as inspiration for other engineers to build on. We are already collaborating with several engineers on the StackPacks currently out there.

Right now, there are two open-source StackPacks available. One of them, the SAP StackPack, synchronizes SAP topology and telemetry with StackState. The other, the Custom Synchronization StackPack, is a building block that makes it possible to connect StackState to other systems.

We are planning to open-source other StackPacks in the coming months, such as our AWS and Kubernetes StackPacks. Stay tuned!

About StackState

StackState's Topology-Powered Observability platform lets you more effectively manage your dynamic IT environment by unifying performance data from your existing monitoring tools into a single pane of glass. Enabling you to:

  • Decrease MTTR: Decrease MTTR by 80% by identifying root cause and alerting the right teams with the right information.

  • Less Outages: Reduce the number of outages by 65% through real-time unified observability and more planful planning.

  • Faster Releases: Increase application releases by 3X by giving time back to developers.


Profile Martin van Vliet

Martin van Vliet

2 min read