Halifax’s topLog announced Wednesday its new product for application developers will soon be available on the Bitnami platform, which should help increase its distribution.
For the last two years, topLog has been developing software that helps notify developers and system administrators if there is a problem on their system and to sort out any troubles quickly.
The company will soon launch a “freemium” version, meaning that users can download a basic product for free and pay for additional functionality.
It is partnering with San Francisco’s Bitnami, which has a platform that offers more than 100 technical tools to software developers and other information technology personnel, including the growing segment of so-called DevOps teams.
It’s difficult to define their jobs, but they tend to span development and operations.
Users can access the tools with a single click, and Bitnami deploys more than one million programs a month.
“For us, it will mean that we will be getting in front of more than one million DevOps users and software developers,” said Ozge Yeloglu, CEO of topLog, in an interview.
She first met with the Bitnami team in May, and the two companies began to discuss a partnership seriously in October.
Yeloglu said topLog’s freemium product is available, and a paid version with analysis features will be available on Bitnami in less than two months.
Growing out of the computer science program at Dalhousie University, topLog began life with the goal of providing system administrators for corporations and large organizations with a tool that would help them prevent system failure.
The team, which now comprises six full-time and two part-time employees, is producing the freemium product so it can be used by a broader range of clients.
In particular, topLog is marketing more to developers of applications, or those who Yeloglu says work on the outward-facing parts of companies, especially software-as-a-service enterprises.
he said the freemium product can serve as an alternative to an increasingly popular trio of open-source tools called Elastic Search, Logstash and Kibana.
The so-called ELK stack is being used by developers who don’t want to pay for software, but it can take a long time to configure them to a developer’s needs. The topLog product will serve the same function and can be downloaded easily, she said.
“This is a great free resource for engineers and developers who want to maintain ownership of their logs and for those who cannot ship their logs to our cloud solution,” said Yeloglu.
A lot of these processes are automated by topLog, solving major problems in this $1.5-billion global industry.
Even before systems and applications collapse, topLog analyzes events that take place over the applications and learns what are normal and anomalous events on the system.
This knowledge can prevent applications from going down and alert teams when anything out of the ordinary happens.
The company, which graduated from the Volta startup house in Halifax in October, has received funding in the past from Innovacorp and BDC Capital. Yeloglu said the company is raising more capital, though she declined to reveal details.
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