Thank you for your continued support of Mackerel. This is 
id:wtatsuru, and I am a producer at Mackerel.
On September 17th, 2024, Mackerel will celebrate its 10th anniversary. In anticipation of this 10-year milestone, this post will once again discuss the directions that Mackerel will take in the future, and will also introduce the release of observability features that the company will be emphasizing in particular.
- Delivering "an easy-to-start and deeply rich observability platform"
- The distributed tracing service Vaxila is now available via Mackerel
- The "Metric Explorer" feature, which allows you to explore and examine labeled metrics, has been released
- The Free Plan is being expanded to include additional features to encourage more users to easily try out the observability features
- A roadmap to the future for observability-related features
Delivering "an easy-to-start and deeply rich observability platform"
To date, Mackerel has concentrated its efforts in the domains of server monitoring and management.
However, system architectures, beginning with cloud-native environments, and the technologies that support them, have continued to evolve. The technologies and methodologies for understanding systems and unknown unknowns are organized under the conceptual categories of monitoring and observability. That said, utilizing these technologies requires advanced skills and deep integration within an organization.
In order to better deal with such increasingly complex issues and system changes, Mackerel will now focus on developing the observability domain, by positioning itself as an "easy-to-start and deeply rich observability platform." Mackerel had previously centered its efforts on the concept of the "development of monitoring," which involves the building of a culture of system operations and monitoring as a team. We now plan to extend this philosophy into the observability domain—expanding standardization and supported environments using OpenTelemetry as the foundation, while enabling the Mackerel observability experience to be an easily adoptable platform that can be readily integrated into your teams.
The distributed tracing service Vaxila is now available via Mackerel
Tracing plays an important role in understanding the interconnectivity within an entire system. In order to provide tracing capabilities to Mackerel users, Mackerel will make the distributed tracing service Vaxila, which is compatible with OpenTelemetry, available starting today (August 26th, 2024). Current Mackerel users can utilize Vaxila free of charge upon submitting a request.
For more details and instructions, please refer to the following entry information.
Currently, Mackerel and Vaxila are available as separate brands, but going forward, we are working on developing the tracing experience as an integrated feature of Mackerel, with plans for an official release during the first half of 2025. We will be conducting our developmental efforts based on all of your valuable feedback, so we look forward to receiving your opinions and thoughts.
The "Metric Explorer" feature, which allows you to explore and examine labeled metrics, has been released
While we offer OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics as a public beta, we have released the "Metric Explorer" feature, which conveniently utilizes these metrics. This feature will allow users to examine labeled metrics posted to Mackerel, as well as to comprehend system conditions.
OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics support are currently available in a public beta version, and will be officially released in November 2024.
The Free Plan is being expanded to include additional features to encourage more users to easily try out the observability features
Up to this point, we have introduced the observability features based on OpenTelemetry. To make it even easier to try out these technologies, we are expanding the available features of our Free Plan starting today (26 August 2024). If you haven't yet tried out our OpenTelemetry or observability technologies yet, we encourage you to take advantage of this special opportunity.
- Users can submit labeled metrics.
- Metric Explorer features will become available.
- Users can create up to one custom dashboard.
Please refer to the following page for more information about the Free Plan.
A roadmap to the future for observability-related features
Mackerel is striving to evolve into an "easy-to-start and deeply rich observability platform," and will concentrate its efforts on developing its observability features. With regard to our roadmap to the future, we are scheduled to implement the following items.
- November 1st, 2024: The release of OpenTelemetry-compatible metrics.
- First half of 2025: The release of distributed tracing features.
- 2026: The release of log management features.
Furthermore, with regard to future monitoring features, we will continue to make improvements and enhancements as they pertain to observability. We hope you will continue to support Mackerel as we further evolve.
