# Cloud Native Rejekts Chicago

> Nishant Modak on Build your own APM instead of buying one — going OpenAPM with Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger.

Source: https://last9.io/events/cloud-native-rejekts-chicago/

[Nishant Modak](https://www.linkedin.com/in/modak/), Founder & CEO at Last9, is giving a talk at Cloud Native Rejekts Chicago on **Build your own APM instead of buying one!** — Saturday, Nov 4, 10:15 AM, Room 1.

### What you'll learn

- **Why commercial APM keeps disappointing** — the cost curve, the data firehose you can't shape, and the proprietary lock-in that comes with it.
- **OpenAPM as the alternative** — composing Grafana, Prometheus, and Jaeger into a monitoring stack that holds its own against the big-name vendors at a fraction of the cost.
- **MELT, properly understood** — what Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces each actually buy you, and why the metric type you pick matters more than the tool you pick.
- **Minimum Viable Monitoring** — focused dashboards with PromQL that surface the signal you need without drowning you in panels.

Observability is an iterative practice, not a procurement decision. Come trade notes.