Businesses in the software industry use observability technologies to get an inside look into the health of the apps they are using in production. Apps that are underperforming can be flagged by observability tools, which can then be used to find out what’s wrong. However, the situation is rarely so straightforward. The adoption of observability is being hampered by technical obstacles, according to a new Splunk poll. A lack of platform alternatives, fragmentation (i.e., too many tools), and worries about open source tools were all highlighted as major roadblocks in the survey.
Datadog, New Relic, PagerDuty, and Splunk have all grown in recent years as the observability business evolved. However, there’s still opportunity for growth. According to Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak, co-founders of the observability software Better Stack, monitoring, logging, incident management and status pages with collaboration features are essential.
To far, Better Stack has secured a total of 18.6 million in a Series A round headed by Creandum, with participation from noteworthy investors such as Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims, K5 Global, Credo Ventures, Kaya and Lachy Groom. CEO Masar said that the money would be used to hire more employees, with the objective of doubling the size of the team from 14 to 30 persons by the end of the year.
Software developers at heart: “We’re building products we always wanted to use ourselves,” Masar explained in an interview. One of Masar’s prior roles at Represent.com, an online clothing retailer, was as the vice president of engineering. Before developing Wallmine, a financial markets data platform, and joining Better Stack, Kolejak worked as a software engineer at Shopify and Google. It wasn’t necessary to raise the Series A round in order to survive, according to Masar. In order to take advantage of the recent layoffs, we’d like to keep creating an incredible workforce.
ClickHouse, Yandex’s database management system, is the foundation upon which Better Stack’s solution is based, allowing customers to produce real-time analytics reports using SQL queries. As of 2021, ClickHouse, a corporation, will be in charge of maintaining and improving the open-source project, which has been open-sourced since 2016.
Better Stack is a stand-alone ClickHouse project with observability-specific tweaks. The platform, for example, collects logs and data from various components of a tech stack in order to keep tabs on the functionality, uptime, and performance of those components. For example, according to Masar, Better Stack may send notifications to employees automatically via on-call schedules or escalation processes, and it also provides collaboration tools that employees can utilise to examine observability data with one another.
Data visualisation and support for SQL queries for bespoke reports are further features of Better Stack. Observe, Manta, and Cribl are all examples of comparable software observability solutions. Masar, on the other hand, believes that Better Stack’s solution is more complete and up to ten times less expensive than the competition.
Users had to mix at least three separate tools before using Better Stack to acquire the same capabilities. As a result of the pandemic, corporations began looking for cheaper alternatives to expensive legacy observability providers, which helped our company, according to Masar. “Better Stack is easy to use for engineering teams since it uses SQL instead of a specialised querying language. Developers may collaborate in real time using features similar to those found in Figma. Finally, it makes it easier to integrate products.”
The fact is that Better Stack is currently being used by over 1,400 teams at organisations such as Time.com, Decathlon, and Accenture, among others. Over 70,000 developers are currently utilising Masar’s platform, but the business refuses to provide revenue figures.