Over the past few years, there has been an incredible revolution in the way that software applications are built and run. The Cloud has simplified and accelerated time to development, Big Data has made applications smarter and more predictive, and Microservices are changing the way we think about our application architecture. Needless to say, it’s a fun time to be a software developer.
But, as with every revolution, new problems emerge. And as applications have trended towards a more distributed, data-centric, and segmented architecture, keeping them up and running reliably has become more of a challenge.
This is the exact problem that Tal Weiss and his co-founders at OverOps faced a few years ago after selling their startup VisualTao to Autodesk. Tal and his team were charged with mobilizing the Autodesk application, which was no easy task. The team relished the challenge of writing a distributed, cloud-based application that scaled to support millions of concurrent mobile users, but at the same time, they were frustrated that the state of the art of finding, analyzing, and debugging errors in production code had not kept up with the new software stack.
Some of the best companies are born out of frustration. This is exactly how OverOps was born. Tal and his co-founders — some of the smartest technologists in Israel — asked themselves “if we could build it from the ground up it, how would we build a better event management tool for the cloud era?” It took over 2.5 years of development to build the ideal tool, but what OverOps unveiled in April of last year was nothing short of revolutionary.
Today, the state of the art for application event management is Splunk, a $6B+ public company that has changed the way developers and IT managers fix their code. Splunk helps developers search for, identify and narrow in on potential application problems, but in a distributed, modern application there’s an incredible amount of log data that a developer must sift through. In many cases, it can take hours or days to find, simulate, and fix an application problem in a production environment.
The OverOps team rethought the traditional search paradigm of log management tools, and invented smart logs that bring a developer directly into the source code at the time of error with deep visibility into the objects and variables that may have caused an error. By monitoring an application at the lowest level, OverOps extracts rich, smart data in real-time, resulting in something that has to be seen to be believed.
OverOps launched their product in April 2015 and within a year has gained over 120 enterprise and mid-market customers… all by word of mouth. By using OverOps, these customers — some of the most innovative, forwarding thinking organizations in the world — can now find the root cause of their application issues 10x faster than using traditional log management tools.
Lightspeed is excited to announce that we are leading OverOps’ $15M Series B financing to help the company accelerate investments in sales, marketing and R&D. At Lightspeed, we look to partner with founders who challenge the status quo, take a fresh look at a burning problem, and find a step-function solution to problems in big markets… and Tal and the team at OverOps are a great example of this. We are excited about how Tal and the OverOps team are rethinking the way developers and devops managers will find, analyze and resolve their production code issues in this new world of distributed cloud, big data and mobile applications.
☞ And, you can always follow me on Twitter.
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He brings significant infrastructure, cloud, and analytics expertise to the OverOps board. Prior to joining Lightspeed, Arif worked in the Corporate Business Development group at Cisco Systems. Earlier in his career, Arif worked in technical development and product management roles at WebTV (acquired by MSFT), Andes Networks (acquired by SUNW), and Sun Microsystems.
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