Observational startup Better Stack raises $18.86 million in new cash – TechCrunch

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In the software industry, monitoring tools provide business insights into the health of their production applications. At best, observability tools can indicate when applications are performing optimally and identify root causes of problems. But this is not so easy. According to a recent survey by Splunk, 86% of developers see technology-related issues as a challenge to adopt observability. In the poll, they cited inadequate legacy tools, lack of platform options, and fragmentation (ie, too many tools) as major barriers, along with concerns about open source tools.

The observability market has grown in recent years with vendors such as Datadog, New Relic, PagerDuty, and the aforementioned Splunk. But there is room for improvement. At least, that’s what it looks like from Juraj Masar and Veronika Kolejak, co-founders of Better Stack, a product that combines monitoring, logging, risk management and status pages with collaboration tools.

Better Stack announced $18.86 million in a Series A round led by Creandum with participation from Susa Ventures, K5 Global, Credo Ventures, Kaya and Lachie Groome, as well as notable angels such as Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims. Masar, who serves as BetterStack’s CEO, said the funding will be used toward hiring, with plans to expand the team from 14 to about 30 people by the end of the year.

Better stack

Image Credits: Better stack

“We’re software developers at heart — we’re always making products that we want to use ourselves,” Massar said in an interview. With several startups under his belt, Masar was previously VP of Engineering at Represent.com, an apparel e-commerce merchant. Before co-founding the financial market data platform and joining Better Stack, Kolejak Walmin held various software engineering roles at Shopify and Google. “Serie A was a fundraising opportunity – we didn’t need to raise the round to survive,” Massar continued. “We want to take advantage of the current strike to continue to rapidly build an amazing team.”

The Better Stack product is built on ClickHouse, a Yandex-developed database management system that allows users to generate real-time analytical reports via SQL queries. ClickHouse was opened in 2016, and in 2021, a corporate entity – ClickHouse, Inc. – Initiated to maintain and improve the project.

Better Stack is independent from the original ClickHouse project, with customization for observability issues. For example, the platform integrates logs and metrics across applications and services in the technology stack to monitor the availability, uptime, and performance of those applications and services. Better Stack can automatically notify employees through call schedules and escalation policies, Massar says, and it offers collaboration tools that employees can use to collaboratively analyze observational data.

Beyond this, Better Stack can create data visualizations and support SQL queries for custom reports. That’s similar to other software observation solutions out there, like Observe, Manta, and Cribl. But Masar asserts that Better Stack’s offering is more comprehensive and up to 10 times cheaper.

“Prior to Better Stack, users typically needed to combine at least three different devices to achieve the same functionality. “The pandemic has had a positive impact on our business since Cubans began exploring cost-effective alternatives to expensive legacy surveillance providers,” Massar said. “Better Stack uses SQL for querying data instead of a custom query language, making it intuitive for engineering teams to use. [Moreover,] It focuses on FEMA-like collaboration that allows developers to work together in real time. And finally, it makes product integration easier.

In any case, more than 1,400 groups at companies, including Time.com, Decathlon and Accenture, are paying for Better Stack today. Masar declined to disclose revenue, but said more than 70,000 developers are actively using the company’s platform.

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