Metrist, a startup that helps IT teams stay on top of outages among the many cloud services they use to run their own applications, today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million seed round from the likes of Heavybit, Morado Ventures, as well as PagerDuty co-founder Alex Solomon and StatusPage co-founders Scott and Steve Klein.<\/p>\n
The overall idea behind Metrist is pretty straightforward, but there are surprisingly few companies doing this. While products like Twitter or StatusPage (which is now owned by Atlassian) allow companies to easily communicate issues with their services to their users, they don\u2019t always reflect every problem and service degradation \u2014 something that then comes into play when it\u2019s time to review an SLA agreement or a contract comes up for renewal and the two parties have vastly different perceptions of a product\u2019s reliability. And while application performance monitoring and observability tools like New Relic or Honeycomb can give you some of this data, it\u2019s not their core use case as these services tend to be inward facing.<\/p>\n
\u201cApps are built on top of other apps today,\u201d Metrist co-founder and CEO Jeff Martens told me. \u201cThat means if one of them goes down or gets degraded or has some kind of an issue, your app and your business can potentially have the same fate. But current observability tools don\u2019t do anything special for those external dependencies \u2014 they still continue to focus inward. You can find out things about your external dependencies \u2014 it\u2019s not that you can\u2019t know \u2014 but the challenge really becomes verifying so you can take action, but then also hold your vendors accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than anything else, Metrist wants to become the trusted neutral player that buyers and vendors can refer to when they discuss outages. The service will be a success, Martens said, when Metrists is written into a contract as the third-party independent validator of an SLA.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo many of the incidents posted to StatusPage simply reference upstream or third-party providers,\u201d said StatusPage co-founder Steve Klein. \u201cIt\u2019s exciting that Metrist is going after the root of the problem, creating visibility where before there was none.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/metrist_team.png\")
<\/p>\nMetrist team<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
On the technical side, Metrist uses either an agent or eBPF to gather data about the services a company runs, but it also constantly checks for downtime and service degradations from 21 different cloud regions across AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Out of the box, Metrist covers more than 100 services, but customers can also host their own tests or use in-app tests. The team noted that these tests also go well beyond simply checking for a correct HTTP response code.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not just like pinging an API and saying, \u2018does this URL return to 200 or 202?\u2019 Say you\u2019re hitting an endpoint and it\u2019s supposed to create a thing in that platform \u2014 we actually will call the retrieval API later to see how long it took to create that thing,\u201d Metrist co-founder and CTO Ryan Dufflield explained.<\/p>\n
Customers also get a lot of flexibility when and how they get alerted of an issue. For some, a two-percent increase in latency may be unacceptable, while for others, that\u2019s no issue, for example. Alerts can go to Slack, email Datadog or PagerDuty (and users can create their own alerting systems using webhooks, too).<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/gp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/Metrist-Service-Details.png\")
<\/p>\nImage Credits:<\/strong> Metrist<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While Metrist is only announcing its funding today, it\u2019s worth noting that the team actually raised this amount over two different raises, including a pre-seed before the product even existed. Both happened proactively, Martens explained, without the team actually going out to raise. This happened just before the economy and the funding environment changed.<\/p>\n \u201cModern applications depend on an ever-increasing number of cloud products managed by external vendors, but the overall approach to observability hasn\u2019t changed. You wouldn\u2019t dream of operating your internal services blindly and you need to manage your cloud dependencies with the same care,\u201d Heavybit general partner Joe Ruscio explained. \u201cMetrist enables teams to proactively know when an external service is down, with the goal of avoiding or mitigating incidents stemming from dependencies. Metrist\u2019s approach to third-party observability ensures teams know authoritatively when SLAs are not met.\u201d<\/p>\n Metrist offers a free plan that allows you to monitor up to three services with one day of data retention. Paid plans start at $99\/month for seven services and seven days of data retention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Metrist, a startup that helps IT teams stay on top of outages among the many cloud services they use to run their own applications, today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million seed round from the likes of Heavybit, Morado Ventures, as well as PagerDuty co-founder Alex Solomon and StatusPage co-founders Scott and Steve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1240977,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1240975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1240975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1240975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1240975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1240975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}