Observability company source{d} has introduced an enterprise version of its data platform and started letting private users, open source maintainers and smaller teams into its community edition beta.

For those new to the party, source{d} aims at giving “IT executives visibility into codebases, IT teams & processes”, since the company has identified a lack thereof as a main cause of projects failing. Its platform gathers data from all over the software development lifecycle (e.g. source code, project management tools, issue trackers) and transforms them into an easier to digest, visual representation for “data-driven decision making”.

The company’s projects are largely open source (Apache License 2.0 and GPL 3.0), and also make use of other open source offerings such as Docker and Apache Software Foundation incubating BI-project Superset.

Both source{d} editions let users create visualisations through a web interface, that lets them choose a data source and visualisation style. For those needing to display more intricate factors, the platform comes with an SQL editor which can be used for custom queries that can be turned into metrics and charts. Once all of this is done, users are able to compile the visualisations into dashboards for different entities.

Since the company is also big on trying to put machine learning into the mix, source{d} also comes with universal abstract syntax trees. These let devs take a more nuanced look at identifiers and functions used in their code, but probably more importantly they help with the extraction of language features. This is needed for the machine learning on code approach source{d} pushes, which is meant to for example automatically help make programmers aware of naming mishaps and similar issues.

Source{d} CE isn’t technically new, but has been around as source{d} engine for a while. In recent months the project has seen the addition of default dashboards with built-in Git and metadata queries for things like the number of collaborators on a project or its commit evolution. It also comes with helpers to add database records, import table definitions and CSV files, and retrieve data from popular repository management service GitHub.

While this is all good and well, enterprise users might need a little more, which is why the enterprise offering facilitates the connection with business intelligence tools such as PowerBI or Tableau. Another big concern in this realm is security, so source{d} EE can integrate with authentication providers OpenID, LDAP, and OAuth and offers ways to define who can edit and see what. To help speed up the setup process, users can also choose between four customisable but pre-defined solutions for talent management, monitoring engineering effectiveness, cloud-native and DevOps Transformation, and IT modernisation and compliance. 

Instances are offered as managed or self-managed versions and can be hosted on the source{d} cloud, in an enterprise’s private cloud or on-premise.

Those who are more interested in giving the beta of the Community Edition a go and willing to give up their contact data in the process, can sign up for that on the company’s website. However, they might have to wait for a while until they are allowed in (if you’re willing to have a call and go through the installation process together with source{d}, it may speed up things).