Notebooks for DevOps and SRE: Open-sourcing the Fiberplane plugin system

Elena Boroda — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 12:47:15 +0000

We’re so excited to share that we’ve open-sourced the Fiberplane plugin system. In a Fiberplane notebook, you can debug infrastructure, resolve incidents and create post-mortems. Open-sourcing our plugin system allows you to connect your favorite Observability, SRE, or DevOps tools with Fiberplane.

📣 PSA: Register for our open-source challenge!

Why we built Fiberplane

We created Fiberplane because we found ourselves context-switching way too much between open tabs, video calls, and multiple monitoring and observability tools, showing metrics, logs, and traces. While there’s so much data and specifically observability data, there’s no tool that lets you pull all this data into one place.

Over the past two years, we’ve been working hard on the first real-time collaborative notebook for the observability space to make infrastructure debugging faster and easier.

Why we’re open sourcing

We want to enable everyone dealing with incidents, postmortems, and infrastructure debugging to do as much of their work as possible as seamlessly and as collaboratively as they can.

The Fiberplane plugins compile to WebAssembly, and can run both in the browser and the backend. They open the possibility to create custom integrations with observability, monitoring, and CI/CD tools or even issue tracking and version control systems.

We’re also open-sourcing our Provider Development Kit (PDK), written in Rust, which allows building your own plugins or providers.

Features of our open-source launch

🔓 Open-sourcing WebAssembly-based plugin system

This allows you to connect to observability tools. Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Sentry, Cloudwatch, Grafana Loki, and a generic HTTP provider are already at your disposal, with more in the making from our side.

🛠️ Open-sourcing the Fiberplane Provider Development Kit (PDK)

The PDK is written in Rust and allows you to build your own plugins and integrations.

📦 Fiberplane Daemon

The Fiberplane Daemon executes the plugins safely if you’re using your own infrastructure - for example, it can be installed as a container inside a Kubernetes cluster.

Features of Fiberplane

🚨 Collaborative, cell-based notebook

Collaborate with your teammates to debug inside a cell-based notebook in real time.

📊 Useful integration with Prometheus and other tools

Write and run PromQL queries, and display Prometheus charts and tables alongside the rest of your content. Query, search, and analyze your logs in Elasticsearch, and Loki. We encourage our community to contribute Providers.

🗄️ Templates for runbooks

Fiberplane also comes with templates that let you generate runbooks. Provide ****structure to a notebook, to ensure consistent outcomes. Use and modify the templates we provide, or build your own easily.

💁🏻‍♀️ Fiberplane CLI

Share your terminal debugging output with your team with a one-off command. Our CLI is open if you want to build it from source, and we’re open to contributions.

What’s next?

We’re constantly improving Fiberplane. Soon, you will be able to use “Views”. This feature lets you group your notebooks into a playlist-like collection.

We’re also shortly launching snippets, which will allow you to insert groups of cells into an existing notebook. And more - based on your feedback!

And in the meanwhile: Join our open-source challenge

We want to celebrate the first contributions to the Fiberplane ecosystem. That’s why we created a small competition. In fact, there are three. To submit your code contribution to one of the challenges, use this form. You can also try out Fiberplane.

DEV Community: Elena Boroda