The end of zero interest rates has forced companies to find savings wherever they can, but one sector remains a major budget drain. Observability — gathering and understanding data and systems — is typically an organization’s second-largest cloud expense, right behind cloud provisioning. People have even gone so far as to speak of one. The observational cost crisisCoinbase’s expenses are underscored by stories like this. $65 million on its data dog bill.
And why is observation so expensive and important? Complex cloud architectures and microservices are here to stay, and with security issues and service outages so common, cross-teams need observational data to operate the system.
Now called a startup. Dash 0 is starting to address the cost issue—if not by being cheaper, then at least by making it easier to purchase and pay for their services.
Dash0—pronounced “Dash-zero”—is a competitor to DataDog whose pitch doesn’t revolve around drastically reducing observation costs. Founder Mirko Novakovic (left in photo above) still expects companies to spend 10% to 20% of cloud spending on this budget item. But he and his team want to improve transparency, both in terms of pricing and oversight.
Dash0 says it can do this by taking full advantage of the open-source observability framework OpenTelemetry (aka OTel) in the way it’s built, Novakovich told TechCrunch, which includes a feature Semantic conventions which allows anyone, “at any time, [to] “Look at exactly which service or which developer or which application creates what the cost is towards observation,” he said.
There are other companies, like Signoz, that describe themselves as OTel-native, but Dash0’s positioning is resonating with investors. It raised a $9.5 million seed funding round led by Excel, with participation from MulesSoft founder Ross Mason’s investment firm Dig Ventures.
Nukovich’s track record may have helped, too. His previous company, Instana, also backed by Accel, was acquired by IBM in late 2020 for $500 million, a price that has never been publicly disclosed before. Several other Instana alums are also now part of the Dash0 team.
If Dash0 is built on OTel, it is also trying to optimize it. The framework has actually been around since 2019, but “it’s not that easy to use right now,” Novakovic said. “Vendors have to do a lot of work to make sure it’s as easy as installing a DataDog agent. That’s where we’re still behind the proprietary guys.
As a company, Dash0 hopes to unlock the benefits of OTel — vendor-agnostic standardized data — but with an intuitive UI, dashboards, and integrations with Slack, email and other tools. Its initial target customers are companies with between 50 and 5,000 employees.
The company is now launching publicly, but it won’t invest heavily in sales and marketing until it’s confident it has product-market fit. In the meantime, Novakovich said, his resources will go toward growing the tech and product side of his team, which now consists of 21 people, 19 of whom are engineers, all working remotely.
Its next 10 hires will include a developer relations specialist who will also contribute to the adoption of OpenTelemetry as a solid alternative to proprietary options. On this front, the company plans to work with other OTel-related startups and ensure that the “missing pieces” like dashboards and query languages fall into place with projects like Persis and PromQL. . “It’s a community effort with consumers,” Novakovic said.
Credit : techcrunch.com
