History

Context: the increasing complexity of IT systems...

IT systems are getting more and more complex over the years. IT systems are not any more living by themselves, but they are integrated with one another, distributed, and often exposing their API to third parties.

Controlling API clients integration, performing impact analysis, identifying the Root Cause of issues… all these actions are taking more and more time to engineering and support teams, often impacting their original tasks.

Existing alternatives are too often limited to manual analysis of custom made logs, low level network tooling or partial visibility with expensive Application Performance Management (APM) solutions.

Birth

Spider has been developed by Thibaut Raballand to fill a gap in the observability solutions for distributed systems. It's development started as a POC in beginning of year 2016.

Design from the start for distributed systems and scalability in mind, it has been used for 4 years in Flowbird internal systems by up to 40 users to observe 3 different IT systems over more than 10 environments. With a baseline capture of 400MB/s and spikes over 1 GB/s, it has been battle tested in Flowbird production systems.

Spider is unique in the market and brings a new way to observe anyone’s IT system. It’s like putting NSA Echelon on your own IT system!

Author

Thibaut has 19 years experience in IT systems, and went from testing expert to full stack systems architect.

He is now Lead Technology and Framework at Flowbird, and has a wide expertise over most software engineering areas.
He has always been building tools to help teams analyze and automate analysis and tests of their systems.

Thibaut is very much appreciated by his teams and colleagues and has always pushed his team forward to improve their competences and the software product qualities.

Floocus SAS

Thibaut has created Floocus SAS to market and sell Spider to any company, small to large. In fact, any company that manages its own IT system to conduct business.

Spider will be available both for installation on clients premises, or as a Software as a Service.

Floocus also offers value added services such as training, consulting, plugins and protocol parsing development to help its customers get the most out of Spider.

Floocus anticipates many investments in the next few years to become an essential and easy to use solution for all.