Chronosphere integrates with LaunchDarkly, Render goes after big enterprises

"Devtools Weekly" by Hypeburner tracks the business of developer tools. I'm your editor, Hashim Warren.

There was a good mix of new feature releases this week, and there's a lot to break down. I think you'll find that the most useful part of today's newsletter is the part where I rework Grafbase's go-to-market.

Let's get into it...

Hot Product Launch

Observability platform Chronosphere is making moves.

First they aquired Calyptia, "a leading provider of observability pipeline solutions."Just weeks later they announced an integration with the most popular release management SaaS, LaunchDarkly.

Chronosphere competes with New Relic and Datadog.

Enterprise Watch

🏆Platform-as-a-Service, Render now offers "high availability for PostgreSQL". This feature spins up a replica database with automatic failover if your production database hits a problem.

Render only offers high availability for "pro" or paying customers, not on the product's free tier. This type of feature is exactly what a Sales team needs - clear differentiation between pricing tiers with critical features for large customers.

For that, Render earns the "Enterprise Watch" spot this week!

Front-End Products

✨ Vercel Analytics has finally become usable, because now it has UTM parameter support. To all of the Marketers and Ad Managers who were forced by the Engineering team to use Vercel Analytics before last week, I feel your pain.

✨ Speaking of Vercel, the company's impressive AI builder for UI components has new competition coming. Builder.io is launching their own AI-powered tool in less than a month. Register for the launch event.

✨ Grafbase launched automatic persisted queries, and configurable introspection. This is on top of the release of federated GraphQL subscriptions, which I covered last week.

Grafbase missed an opportunity by announcing three new features over two weeks. Instead, the team could have won more market attention by weaving a story together about the customer impact of these related changes. That's an attractive angle for a tight "launch week".

Here's how Grafbase could have run a launch week:

Monday - announce the launch week with a name and a theme. Collect prospect emails.

Tuesday thru Thursday - roll out the three new features. Surprise and delight email subscribers with branded swag each day.

Friday - run a live webinar and demo of each feature. Deliver prospect emails to Sales for follow-up.

✨ Database service Planetscale moved foreign key constraints to GA. This new feature "can be used to enforce referential integrity in your database."

✨ Headless CMS, Directus unveiled version 10.9. This comes with "new focal point support, a new hash display, a huge bug fix, and a few breaking changes"

No Friday live workshop this week. See you on the next newsletter! - Hashim Warren, Hypeburner.