Foxglove launches upgraded platform with enhanced observability

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Foxglove says its updated platform is designed for robotics developers, operators, researchers, and enthusiasts. | Source: Foxglove

Foxglove, a developer of robotics tools, has launched an updated version of its platform. The company says Foxglove 2.0 represents a leap forward for developers seeking an end-to-end system for robotics observability.

The company says that its base has grown to over 15,000 monthly active users three years after releasing its initial platform. It designed its new platform for robotics developers, operators, researchers, and enthusiasts. It has also introduced a new, flexible price plan to better serve the full robotics community.

Foxglove designed the revised pricing model to make its tools more accessible to a wide range of users, from hobbyists and startups to large-scale enterprise teams. It has added a Starter plan alongside the existing Free, Team, and Enterprise plans.

“Foxglove 2.0 represents a paradigm shift for us – from discrete visualization and data platform products to a unified robotics observability platform. Our team is dedicated to expanding the GDP of robotics, and we can’t wait to see what our users are empowered to build with this new release,” Adrian Macniel, co-founder and CEO of Foxglove, said in a release. 

What’s new in Foxglove 2.0

The upgraded platform combines the company’s previously separate Foxglove Studio and Data Platform products into a single platform. The company says the integration addresses the challenges of multimodal robotics data, offering a unified system for data logging, ingestion, and visualization. 

The result is a cohesive user experience that eliminates the need for constant switching between tools, streamlining the development and dubbing process for robotics develops, the company said.

The latest addition to the platform is Foxglove Agent. The company designed this feature to facilitate real-time access to high-definition data across both the cloud and at the edge. The Agent is a service that runs directly on any robot ensuring that data from robotics operations is easily accessible, enhancing collaboration across teams, and improving efficiency in incident management and debugging, according to the company.

End of open source edition

Foxglove also announced it will discontinue the open-source edition of its Studio visualization tool. The company says this decision reflects its strategic shift towards offering a single unified platform for robotics observability, instead of separate visualization and data platform products. This announcement does not affect MCAP, a popular log file format developed by the company, or Foxglove’s other open-source projects, which the company says will remain fully supported. Foxglove is a 2023 RBR50 Innovation Award winner for standardizing robotics data recording with MCAP.

In August 2023, the company announced improved URDF support, enabling users to simply open a WebSocket connection from the Foxglove web app to fetch mesh files from a remote PC or an isolated environment like a Docker container.

“Data visualization is a core feature of our product and a significant portion of our development focus. Given our shift towards offering a unified robotics observability platform, we made the difficult decision to discontinue the open-source edition of Foxglove Studio. We remain committed to advancing open source robotics through MCAP and our many other open source projects,” Roman Shtylmanl, co-founder and CTO of Foxglove, said in a release.