Epsagon raises $16 million to automate cloud app and microservices monitoring

Managing multiple apps across cloud environments isn’t a walk in the park by any stretch. That’s why Ran Ribenzaft and Demisto veteran Nitzan Shapira cofounded Epsagon, which uses distributed tracing and agentless code to give engineers greater visibility into apps. Two years later, the company hit its stride, more than quadrupling its customer roster in the past 12 months alone and expanding into verticals such as the internet of things, technology, retail, media, insurance, smart mobility, and telecommunications.

This momentum evidently impressed investors like U.S. Venture Partners, which led the $16 million series A Epsagon announced this morning. Previous backers Lightspeed Venture Partners and StageOne Ventures also contributed to the round, which CEO Shapira says will fuel growth on the R&D, sales, and marketing sides of Epsagon’s business. “Cloud microservices have enabled companies to build applications faster than ever before, yet visibility into what’s working and what’s running in production remains a challenge,” he said. “[T]oday we’re continuously evolving our … platform to scale with the growing cloud microservices stack.”

Via Transportation, Volta, Healthline, Freenet Group, and Farmer’s Fridge are among the companies using Epsagon’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, which monitors and helps troubleshoot problems with production and development apps and microservices (i.e., loosely coupled services). It’s able to run in a container, virtual machine, or function-as-a-service (FaaS) in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud without arduous coding or tagging required. And it automatically traces and connects requests in transactions to eliminate the need for sampling.

With Epsagon, customers can search across traces and payloads and log in through a web dashboard. There, they’re able to see collated metrics, errors, and analyses in several visual formats (like charts and tables), as well as program alerting rules, which can notify teams via email, Webhook, Slack, or Microsoft Teams when something goes wrong.

Epsagon supports popular programming languages — including NodeJS, Python, Go, Java, and .NET — and it’s compatible with OpenTracing, a vendor-agnostic API that lets developers instrument tracing into app code bases. Plus, the platform automatically connects to Amazon CloudWatch metrics and AWS metadata with other sources, and it visualizes all Docker containers and microservices.

“As a fast-growing business that runs on the cloud, we needed enhanced visibility into what’s working and what’s in production in order to keep our application running smoothly — Epsagon provides that and much more,” said Via development group manager Ynon Cohen. “Our DevOps and engineering teams turn to Epsagon every day to closely monitor, visualize, and fix any potential issues in our software to ensure our customers are getting the best product and service possible.”

The microservices monitoring segment is enormous, as perhaps evidenced by Splunk’s acquisition of cloud monitoring platform SignalFx for $1.05 billion. San Francisco-based Sysdig raised $68.5 million in September 2018 for its suite of tools that boost security and performance for containers and cloud-native apps, and OverOps raised $30 million for products that help developers debug code by performing code analysis and tracking code changes and then highlighting the specific source code. Unsurprisingly, some estimates put the global market north of $1.9 billion by 2022.