Rookout is a company that empowers developers to solve customer issues 5x faster by making debugging easy and accessible in any environment from cloud-native to on-prem and from dev to production. And with its live data collection and debugging platform, Rookout enables software engineers to handle the complexity of modern applications by seeing into their code in real-time as it is running. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Rookout co-founder and CTO Liran Haimovitch to learn more.
Liran Haimovitch’s Background
Liran Haimovitch has always been fascinated by technology, computing, and the power of well-constructed software. Haimovitch said:
My career has been centered around these interests and has taken me through several different industries. Before co-founding Rookout, I spent time as a cybersecurity software engineer where I focused on complex cybersecurity solutions and developed a deep understanding of network security, web development, and infrastructure. This role also allowed me to develop my problem-solving skills and fueled my passion for creating efficient and secure software solutions.
After seeing the challenges developers face in debugging and understanding their code in live environments, I co-founded Rookout in 2017. Our goal at Rookout is to make the process of debugging more efficient by providing a tool that allows for real-time data collection and pipelining from live code, simplifying a traditionally challenging aspect of software development.
In terms of thought leadership, I’m deeply committed to exploring the intersections of debugging, observability, and agility in the realm of software development. I frequently write and speak about these topics, aiming to contribute to the broader conversation in the tech industry.
As the CTO of Rookout, my role allows me to combine my passion for technology with my drive to solve complex problems. It’s a position that challenges me every day and continually pushes me to innovate and improve. I believe that the combination of my technical skills, industry experience, and passion for problem-solving equip me to effectively lead Rookout’s technical direction and contribute to the broader tech industry.
Formation Of Rookout
How did the idea for Rookout come together? Rookout’s founders have been involved with software development for decades and were frustrated by the absence of transparency and comprehension in code, particularly within cloud-native environments. And most of the observability solutions that came to market addressed these concerns from an Ops perspective – Rookout wanted to build a tool for developers.
“Still today, developers waste a lot of time combing through log lines, extra metric measurements, attachment of a debugger to running processes, method tracing, reproduction of the problem on their local machines, and other time-consuming and costly methods. These methods not only frustrate developers, but also lead to a significant waste of resources, and their implementation can take a few hours to several weeks, depending on the company. Debugging microservices locally, reproducing errors, and tracking user requests between asynchronous modules have become overly complicated,” Haimovitch reflected.
Rookout’s founders believe that this paradigm needs to change in order to help developers and R&D leaders save substantial time and money.
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Haimovitch faced in building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate affected the company?
“One of the main focuses at Rookout in the past half-year has been to help developers adapt to development and troubleshooting in new and emerging technologies and help R&D leaders save money in this uncertain economy. Rookout understands the need for simple, efficient, and cost-effective solutions,” Haimovitch acknowledged. “Every day we see challenges evolve quickly as methods and technology keep changing. For a while now, we have been working diligently with our customers to transition to cloud-based architectures with new needs and costs.”
Core Products
What are Rookout’s core products and features?
-Live Debugger: Fetch data from dynamically deployed, distributed applications with no need for SSH or deploying a new version. Debug across dev, staging, and production as if the app was running on your laptop.
-Live Logger: Cut down the noise of application-level logging verbosity. Empower every engineer on your team to dynamically change the verbosity level to INFO, DEBUG, or TRACE level logs in a single click to get the right amount of data. Optimize logging cost and application performance by applying robust filters to fully control log granularity
-Kubernetes Debugging: Easily slice and dice a Kubernetes application within a Rookout session. Identify clusters that require your immediate debugging attention and visualize your application mapping with a click of a button.
Evolution Of Rookout’s Technology
How has Rookout’s technology evolved since launching? Haimovitch replied:
As technology continues to advance, it has gradually shifted towards cloud-based and web-based technologies and architectures in recent years. This shift has brought about significant innovation and agility but has also introduced a considerable level of complexity. What once were simple, monolithic applications have now become hybrid, distributed, and serverless applications. The process of fixing any issues that arise within these new applications can be an arduous and time-consuming task.
Despite technological advancements, developers still face a greater lack of observability, understanding, and insight into their code than they did with simpler technologies. Rookout, however, has been built with developers in mind to bridge this gap and fulfill their need for visibility into their code. Rookout’s Developer-First Observability was specifically designed to face the challenges of modern application architecture and provide a new and innovative debugging and logging solution that empowers developers to obtain immediate insight into their software. This makes it easy for developers to access the data they need from their remote code.
In other words, Rookout offers a fourth pillar of observability: Snapshots provide real-time answers to real-time questions for developers and DevOps engineers by providing context-rich debug data, global variables, stack trace, and more.
We provide dynamic instrumentation, enabled by bytecode manipulation, which gives developers the ability to extract the data they need on the fly, without the need to write additional code or redeploy their applications.
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Rookout’s most significant milestones?
– August 2019: Rookout raises $8 million Series A to expand debugging platform
– March 2020: Rookout Makes Its Rapid Debugging Software Free for Healthcare Organizations Fighting COVID-19
– August 2021: Rookout Launches Live Logger to Significantly Reduce Logging Costs and Overhead
– October 2021: Rookout Named a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor
– August 2022: Rookout Raises $16 Million Series B to Scale Developer-First Observability
– April 2023: Rookout Makes Snapshots the Fourth Pillar of Observability, Capturing Deep Code-Level Insights for Developers
Customer Success Stories
Upon asking Haimovitch about customer success stories, the following quotes were provided:
“Rookout is essential for companies like us who have tight SLAs and strive to be the best provider in the market. Rookout can get production debugging data in seconds and minimize our MTTR without being exposed to the production database. It’s elegant. It’s simple. I love it!” – Ron Teeter, Jobvite
“This is a significant improvement on the previous workflows that had to be followed. Using Rookout means that we don’t have to wait for the infrastructure team to set up environments for us or to turn debug on. We can simply go ahead and collect the data we need from our running applications when we need it.” – Ajitesh Kumar, Amdocs
“Rookout can be a game-changer for us. What manually takes us days to do – and an endless amount of log lines – will now be done in a matter of hours. We will be able to get to the deepest levels of our code and quickly fix any issues. This not only allows us developers to spend more time on other tasks but allows us to level up the experience we provide our customers.” – Oshrit Malach, Seagate
Funding
To date, the company has raised $28 million in funding.
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Rookout pursuing? Haimovitch assessed:
Rookout operates within the software development tooling market, specifically focusing on debugging and data collection in live, running applications. According to various estimates, the global market size for developer tools and platforms is expected to reach several tens of billions of dollars by the mid-2020s, and we believe that the segment we are focusing on represents a substantial portion of this market.
Our target market includes not only large enterprises with substantial software development teams but also smaller companies and startups that are increasingly dependent on software for their operations. The trend toward digital transformation across all industries has expanded the total addressable market substantially.
It’s also important to mention that our solution is language and infrastructure agnostic. This means we can serve a wide range of customers who use different programming languages and host their applications in different environments, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud.
However, we don’t just look at the total addressable market in terms of potential revenue. We see it as an opportunity to help a significant number of developers and teams to become more productive and efficient, to reduce the time they spend on debugging, and allow them to focus more on creating and innovating. This, in our view, is the real potential of the market we’re addressing.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Rookout from its competition? Rookout’s solution is unique in many ways:
— Rookout’s Developer-First Observability is the first of its kind to bridge the gap between developers and Operations.
— Rookout offers developers both a web-based IDE and an IDE-plugin to maximize ease and efficiency in the developer workflow.
— Rookout is the first tool of its kind to offer Serverless, Cloud-Native, Live Metrics, and Front End debugging and logging capabilities and experience.
— Rookout provides the most comprehensive language and environment coverage.
— Rookout is the only tool that cuts logging costs and saves developer time by using live logging in production environments without the need to add log lines to the code.
— Rookout allows developers to measure the response of their application in real-time, on demand.
— Rookout has the highest security compliance (with adherence to SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001).
— Rookout provides rich support and data governance capabilities that are fire tested at a large scale in the production environment of some of the strictest global companies.
Future Company Goals
What are some of Rookout’s future company goals? “To drastically reduce (if not totally eliminate) logging costs and provide developers with the data they need to move fast and ship features. Traditional observability tooling is great – but for the Ops persona. We are hyper-focused on developers and see our platform as their home for troubleshooting and understanding their applications at the code level,” Haimovitch concluded.
