- Technology stack monitoring company Chronosphere announced it raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Greylock
Chronosphere — a platform for monitoring complex technology stacks at a large scale — announced it raised $11 million in Series A funding. Greylock led the funding round with participation from Lux Capital.
And Chronosphere formally launched and unveiled its first product called Chronosphere. Chronosphere enables customers to store and analyze more monitoring data than every before. And it utilizes that data to gain higher-level insights without compromising on performance, reliability or cost. Currently, Chronosphere is in private beta.
“Being able to store tens of billions of metrics is only half the battle,” said Martin Mao, co-founder and CEO of Chronosphere. “While that’s a great first step that large enterprises across sectors will need, making sense of the data and using it effectively is even more challenging and that’s where our platform is focused.”
Mao met with Chronosphere co-founder and CTO Rob Skillington while working at Microsoft together. They oversaw the initial launch of Office 365. And then they reunited at Uber during its hypergrowth phase in order to help the company scale up its infrastructure.
At that time, the volume and complexity of monitoring data being produced and consumed increased by 10x year on year. And this growth was driven by the movement from a few monolithic applications to thousands of microservices along with the migration from hundreds of servers to millions of containers. Neither the open-source solutions Mao and Skillington were using at the time nor the commercially available solutions would be able to handle the level of scale, performance, and cost that was required by the team.
So they built a new solution called M3. They developed M3 in open source from day one for the benefit of the community. And over the course of 4 years, Mao and Skillington led the team that scaled M3 to one of the largest production metrics systems in the world by storing tens of billions of time series while both ingesting and querying billions of data points per second. And this provide Uber with comprehensive insight into its infrastructure and applications for engineers along with real-time visibility of the overall business for operations teams.
“We started by writing an open-source streaming metrics aggregator and distributed time-series database that would scale with the business and operate with zero downtime when availability zones experienced failures,” added Skillington. “At Chronosphere, the team is focused on providing something that companies can start using within minutes, while we continue to develop and maintain M3 as open source.”
Upon recognizing that other high growth companies struggled with the same challenges as they moved to a cloud-native architecture, Mao and Skillington founded Chronosphere so they could bring the benefits of M3 to enterprises everywhere while also continuing to support the open source community — which comprises 7 of the Fortune 200, including Comcast and FedEx.
Chronosphere’s first product is a hosted end-to-end monitoring platform built on top of M3. And Chronosphere’s platform adds enterprise features such as intelligent rate-limiting, resource management, and security and access controls so that all teams within an organization can utilize the power of a single centralized platform.
Plus Chronosphere also provides visualization and alerting capabilities designed to provide for operability at scale given the volume of underlying data. And the platform also helps auto-categorize the data and extracts higher level meaning for deeper insights.
“For enterprises, there is a huge unmet need for high dimensionality (HD) metrics at scale with global reliability and low cost,” explained Greylock partner Jerry Chen. ”Chronosphere enables enterprises to run their business at a resolution that isn’t available from existing open-source and commercial offerings. It’s like using a 4K monitor to run your business: once you use HD you can’t go back to VGA.”
