Monitoring software and infrastructure in production, the practice known as observability, is getting harder — not easier.
According In the recent survey, 69% of developer operations professionals say that observability data is expanding at an “alarming” rate, making it harder to detect anomalies. Meanwhile, professionals are forced to juggle a increasing number of observability tools.
Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak experienced the frustrations firsthand as software developers. Masar is a three-time startup founder, most recently serving as vice president of engineering at crowdsourcing platform Represent.com. A biochemist by training, Kolejak previously worked at Shopify, Google and Merck in various engineering roles.
“Today, developers use dozens of tools that have to be integrated, cost a lot, and feel like they were designed in the 2000s,” Masar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “And it takes years for users to fully understand.”
Masar and Kolejak’s answer is Better Stack, an observability platform they launched in 2021 to combine monitoring, logging and event management into a single dashboard. With support for monitoring apps, websites, servers, databases, and more, Better Stack provides alerts, helps schedule things like on-calls, and click algorithms to normalize metrics from different logs and sources.
Better Stack is not alone in the market for observability suites. Among its rivals is Observe, which offers tools for storing, managing and analyzing machine-generated data and logs. There’s also Chronosphere (worth more than $1.6 billion), Pantomath and Honeycomb, the latter of which secured a $50 million investment last April.
But Masar claims Better Stack offers several advantages over rivals.
Better Stack’s visibility panel.
One that came out in the last few months: AI-powered event muting. According to Masar, the feature is designed to allow engineers to better distinguish critical incidents from the noise, hopefully saving those engineers from waking up in the middle of the night to respond to false or benign alerts.
Masar also claims Better Stack is cheaper and faster than the competition — and more intuitive for engineers to use, thanks to its collaborative approach to data mining. Whether there’s truth to this or not, Better Stack has seemingly had no problem attracting customers, growing its customer base to over 4,000 brands and government agencies in Singapore, Canada, Norway, Australia and the UK
In a vote of confidence from investors, Better Stack — which Masar claims is profitable — recently raised $10 million as part of a Kaya-led tranche with angel investors including Box CEO Aaron Levie. The new cash brought Better Stack’s total capital to $28.6 million, which Masar, Better Stack’s CEO, says is set to grow the startup’s workforce from 28 to 50 by the end of the year and develop new products and services.
Carl Fritjofsson, general partner at Creandum, added in an emailed statement: “At Creandum, we care deeply about product experiences, and Better Stack has not only redefined what beautiful and intuitive observability products look like, but ultimately Better Stack customers will they have the ability to create better products on their own. With 10x lower cost and 10x better performance, we are confident that Better Stack will become an important part of the software infrastructure.”
