distributed-tracing
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Chronosphere and the art of knowing less
Two former Uber engineers built a business around an awkward question: how much of your monitoring data deserves to exist? Chronosphere turns that question into software, and Palo Alto Networks paid billions to bring it into security.
The Company That Put the Haystack on a Diet
Dash0 built an observability business around a heretical idea: keeping every scrap of machine data can make it harder to see what broke. Now its open-standard platform is stretching from incident response into the AI-written code that creates the next incident.
Honeycomb Bet Engineers Would Rather Ask Better Questions Than Stare at More Dashboards
Born from the production chaos at Parse, Honeycomb built an observability business around a stubborn idea: keep the context, query it fast, and let engineers investigate the failure they did not know to predict. Ten years later, that architecture is becoming the evidence layer for AI agents too.
Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana, the widely used open-source dashboarding and observability platform. Founded in 2014 to commercialize Torkel Odegaard's visualization tool, it has grown into a full-stack observability vendor built on a 'big tent' philosophy - letting teams unify metrics, logs, traces and profiles from any source without ripping out existing tools. Its LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) plus Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise now serve more than 7,000 paying organizations, including roughly 70% of the Fortune 50, with the business surpassing $400M in annual recurring revenue and a $6B valuation.
Kloudfuse
Kloudfuse is a Cupertino-based observability company that unifies metrics, logs, traces, real user monitoring, continuous profiling, and LLM monitoring into a single observability data lake that runs inside a customer's own cloud (VPC) rather than a vendor SaaS. Founded in 2022 by veterans of Springpath, Nicira, VMware, and Cisco, it pitches an OpenTelemetry-native, AI/ML-powered platform that gives enterprises data ownership and 60-80% cost savings versus incumbents like Datadog. It launched out of stealth in November 2023 with $23M in funding and is used by companies including GE HealthCare, Zscaler, Tata 1mg, and Automation Anywhere.
Last9
Last9 is a unified observability company that helps engineering and DevOps teams monitor high-cardinality metrics, logs, and traces without the ballooning costs of legacy tools. Built around a Prometheus- and OpenTelemetry-compatible telemetry warehouse called Levitate and a pre-ingestion Control Plane that filters, reshapes, and routes data, Last9 has been used to observe some of the largest live-streaming events in the world - including peaks of roughly 59-61 million concurrent viewers. Founded in 2020 and backed by Sequoia/Peak XV's Surge, Better Capital and others, it targets cost-efficient, full-fidelity observability at enterprise scale.
HoneyHive
HoneyHive is a New York-based AI observability and evaluation platform that helps engineering teams ship reliable AI agents. Built OpenTelemetry-native, it unifies distributed tracing, offline experiments, real-time monitoring, and human-in-the-loop annotation into a single continuous-improvement loop so teams can see not just what an agent output, but how it got there and where it went wrong. Founded in 2022 by Columbia roommates Mohak Sharma and Dhruv Singh, HoneyHive is used in production by enterprises including Commonwealth Bank, NVIDIA, MongoDB, and Pinecone, and raised $7.4M in total seed funding led by Insight Partners.
New Relic
New Relic is a San Francisco-based, AI-powered observability platform that gives engineering teams a single place to see everything running in their software - from application code and infrastructure to logs, user experience, and AI models. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, it helped popularize application performance monitoring (APM) and later coined much of the modern 'observability' category. After going public in 2014 and being taken private in a $6.5 billion deal in 2023, New Relic now serves thousands of companies with usage-based, consumption pricing and a strong bet on AI and agentic observability.