Startup Gives DevOps an Analytics Boost
A new flavor of DevOps is emerging around the concept of intelligent operations as a way to troubleshoot infrastructure issues arising in web-scale application operations.
OpsClarity, Sunnyvale, Calif., said this week its "intelligent operations platform" applies analytics to digest operational data in real time. DevOps teams could then used the resulting insights to monitor and fine-tune web-scale operations.
The DevOps startup also this week announced $11 million investment round led by high-flying technology investor New Enterprise Associates.
OpsClarity CEO Dhruv Jain said the startup is leveraging its experience with streaming analytics to get a handle on hyper-scale operations being embraced by more enterprises. "The rise of cloud-native services and web-scale application architectures has resulted in massive change, scale and complexity challenges for operations," noted Jain, who also co-founded OpsClarity.
The approach aims to keep pace with the rise of application container-based micro-services along with "continuous delivery" operations that are straining DevOps teams. As the lifespan of instances shortens, the startup argues, DevOps teams lack a clear picture of what's going on in complex production environments, particularly as more open-source frameworks are being used to develop distributed micro-services.
OpsClarity promotes its monitoring and analytics platform as helping DevOps teams better understand production issues so they can troubleshoot in real time using diagnostics like rapid event correlation and root-cause analysis. The platform also leverages large-scale machine learning and real-time analytics to provide visualizations of what's happening across applications and infrastructure.
The startup's technical staff includes industry veterans who helped build the Yahoo search cluster management and deployment infrastructure, the eBay cloud platform, Twitter's anomaly detection system and core search algorithms for hyper-scalers like Facebook, Google and Yahoo.
In a blog post, CEO Jain said his team focused on a trio of DevOps challenges that are hardest to solve using existing tools. The first step was building a database of critical web-scale operations. They then attempted to visualize the operational data in a way that would accelerate the alert and troubleshooting processes.
Finally, the startup developed tools for root-cause analysis used to pinpoint and resolve operational glitches. "One good alert is always better than ten alerts that don’t matter," Jain stressed.
Others have taken a hyper-converged approach to operational analytics. VaperIO, which emerged from stealth mode in March, is attempting to remake the datacenter sector with a hyper-collapsed approach that seeks to leverage analytics to automate datacenters that have traditionally separated physical assets from applications.
This approach adds intelligence to the equation by including workloads “as a critical data point” for calculating efficiency in heretofore disconnected datacenters.
Along with New Enterprise Associates, OpsClarity said other investors joining the Series A funding round include AME Cloud, Morado Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.
The startup said its intelligent operations platform is available now. A demonstration is available here.
