The Observability Crisis - Foundation Capital

The initial winners in the observability space focused on solving the problems of data storage and analysis, building on the work of early pioneers: Later entrants like Datadog (founded 2010) and New Relic expanded on these foundations of Appdynamics by offering fuller-stack solutions and trying to unify different types of monitoring on one platform. They were built for the cloud-era. These innovations illuminated previously opaque areas of IT infrastructure. At the same time, with the cloud, companies were experiencing exponential data growth – and drove up complexity by creating microservices and container based architectures. And, by the mid-2010s, organizations were grappling with petabyte-scale observability data annually. This data explosion created a paradox: as information volume increased, extracting actionable insights became more difficult. Traditional query languages and visualization tools struggled to keep pace. Organizations found themselves investing in data lakes and a

The initial winners in the observability space focused on solving the problems of data storage and analysis, building on the work of early pioneers: Later entrants like Datadog (founded 2010) and New Relic expanded on these foundations of Appdynamics by offering fuller-stack solutions and trying to unify different types of monitoring on one platform. They were built for the cloud-era. These innovations illuminated previously opaque areas of IT infrastructure. At the same time, with the cloud, companies were experiencing exponential data growth – and drove up complexity by creating microservice