Grafana announced a new free plan that gives users access to Prometheus and Graphite for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for tracing integrated into Grafana. 

“With Grafana Cloud, you get a service managed by the maintainers of these leading open source projects, whose deep knowledge allows us to run them efficiently at scale better than any other company in the world,” Richard Lam, a senior product manager at Grafana Labs wrote in a blog post.

The paid Grafana Cloud plan was also upgraded to include new features and five time more metrics. 

Cockroach Labs announces $160 million funding
Cockroach Labs wrote that it plans to use the funds for further product development for its cloud-native, distributed SQL database and to expand its staff. 

The latest financing was led by Altimeter Capital with participation from new investors such as Greenoaks and Lone Pine, and many existing investors. 

The company also announced a free version of Cockroach Cloud for development and education that will soon be released in beta.

Additional details are available here.

Blueprint launches RPA platform migration
The new robotic process automation (RPA) platform enables companies to quickly switch from one RPA tool to another, which was previously constrained by many factors such as code parity, lost credentials, absent versioning, and more, according to Blueprint in a post.

The solution takes in bots from any leading RPA tools and then creates a digital blueprint that can be pushed into other RPA platforms. The blueprints also enable automated processes to connect to relevant dependencies, systems, and constraints.

“Our technology reduces the complexities and cost of shifting RPA tools to near zero, allowing companies to pick the platform that’s best for them, regardless of how much they’ve already developed on a competing platform,” said Dan Shimmerman, the president and CEO of Blueprint. “This ultimately pushes RPA tools down the value stack, commoditizing automation and execution platforms, so companies can choose the vendor that offers the best price and value and simply switch.”

Linux Foundation launches open source management and strategy training program
The new program consists of seven modular courses that teach the basic concepts for building effective open source practices within organizations. 

The courses were to designed to be “reasonably high-level,” and detailed enough to help open source users to implement these concepts quickly, according to the Linux Foundation 

“Organizations must prepare their teams to use [open source] properly, ensuring compliance with licensing requirements, how to implement continuous delivery and integration, processes for working with and contributing to the open source community, and related topics,” said Chris Aniszczyk, the co-founder of the TODO Group and VP of Developer Relations at The Linux Foundation. “This program provides a structured way to do that which benefits everyone from executive management to software developers.”