CtrlStack Launches with $5.2 Million Seed Funding Led by Sequoia Capital to Deliver Real-Time Troubleshooting

CtrlStack, the industry’s first DevOps observability platform leveraging a causal graph, launched from stealth with $5.2 million in seed funding co-led by Sequoia Capital and Engineering Capital, with participation from Kearny Jackson, Webb Investment Network, and Lightspeed. Dev Nag leads the company as CEO and founder. No stranger to the world of IT monitoring and analytics, Dev was previously founder and CTO of Wavefront, a leading observability company which was acquired by VMware. He holds more than a dozen patents in machine learning, observability, and security. Now, Dev and the team at CtrlStack are creating a unified experience for handling the challenges of troubleshooting complex, distributed systems.

Businesses are under unprecedented pressure to deliver digital services and applications faster than ever before. How well an application performs in production is dependent on a combination of code, infrastructure and operations. When an incident occurs, teams need to quickly determine if that issue is related to code, infrastructure or operational activity, or a combination of these changes. Yet current approaches to troubleshooting complex issues remain complicated, manual, and fragmented – organizations are still taking hours or days to mitigate and resolve incidents and outages. A recent DEJ report found that 76% of all performance problems can eventually be traced back to changes in the environment, and 66% of MTTR is spent on identifying change that is causing a problem.

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CtrlStack’s mission is to simplify real-time troubleshooting, empowering DevOps teams to embrace changes without the anxiety of failed deployments. With its capability to track system changes and relationships across the stack, CtrlStack provides the only observability solution that connects cause and effect—forming a knowledge graph of all the infrastructure, interconnected services, and change impact. “The monitoring and observability space still relies heavily on human-driven workflows and fragmented data, which is not sustainable given the complexity and constant changes in DevOps environments,” said CtrlStack CEO Dev Nag. “We have to reimagine how we practice observability so teams can troubleshoot in real time, not hours or days. At CtrlStack, building the data connections is just the first step in leveraging machine learning and generative AI to automate operations.”

Bill Coughran, Partner at Sequoia Capital, said: “A flawless digital experience is now the baseline for every business in order to stay competitive. Dev and the CtrlStack team have completely changed the game for developers by bringing simplicity and efficiency to the monitoring and observability process, taking out timely guesswork and leading to faster MTTR. We are excited to partner with them and watch their vision for the next generation observability stack come to life.”

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Ashmeet Sidana, Partner at Engineering Capital, said: “Dev has a special technical insight which has enabled CtrlStack to take a graph-based approach to monitoring the flow of data in the enterprise, and understanding change impact across the stack as operations become more complex. This level of visibility is the first of its kind. We believe the company’s platform—and application for real-time troubleshooting—has the potential to transform the observability market.”

Key product features include:

• Event Timeline — allows teams to easily browse and filter change events without needing to hunt through log files or ask for user input to figure out who made a change.
• Knowledge Graph — a dependency tree that allows teams to discover relationships and connections between operational data (metrics, events, logs, traces, entities, changes).
• Change Impact Dashboard —1-click commit impact dashboard which displays a filtered event timeline, commit information and diff, impacted topology/dependency tree, and impacted metrics.
• Root Cause Analysis Dashboard — 1-click RCA dashboard which displays a filtered event timeline, impacted topology/dependency tree, impacted metrics, and image and commit details.

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