Metrist Launches to Create Observability for Cloud Infrastructure, APIs, and SaaS Products

Using social media as the best source of information during a cloud dependency outage is now a thing of the past thanks to Metrist, Inc., an observability startup launched by two PagerDuty alumni. Metrist gives organizations real-time visibility into cloud dependencies so that they can address outages effectively and hold vendors accountable. The company also announces the General Availability of its product and $5.5m in seed funding led by Heavybit.

Matthew Hensrud, Sr Director of Platform Engineering at Freshly, had this to say about Metrist: “No more waiting for third-party providers to acknowledge an incident we noticed and began investigating twenty minutes ago. Metrist completes our observability story to monitor our third-party services and infrastructure with confidence.”

The average digital business uses more than 100 third-party cloud services to power its products and run the company1, and those services cause up to 70% of all software outages2 with an average cost of $300k per hour3. When downtime happens with services like AWS and Stripe, engineers often address incidents blindly because they don’t have the visibility to know if a cloud dependency is a contributing factor, which then results in confusion, longer mean time to resolution, and higher costs for every incident.

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Metrist created a platform to understand the health of every third-party dependency a customer relies on. Out-of-the-box functional tests run continuously to create visibility into more than 60 popular IaaS, API, and SaaS products. Users can run Metrist software securely on their own for functional tests against any service, while an eBPF agent and language plugins enable observation of how applications interact with cloud dependencies in real time. The result is a platform that alerts users immediately when issues start, offering clear and trusted details on what the problem is, so that impact can be mitigated, incidents resolved quickly, and vendors held accountable to SLAs.

Two veterans of Observability and Incident Management co-founded Metrist after working together as early employees of PagerDuty. Ryan Duffield, CTO, and Jeff Martens, CEO, built Metrist because they experienced first-hand the problems caused by cloud dependencies, and heard time and time again that legacy observability tools didn’t solve the problem. In addition to PagerDuty, Duffield and Martens worked in product development at New Relic, Server Density, and Netdata between them.

“Third parties are a first-class concern, and it’s time for observability to treat them that way,” said Jeff Martens, CEO & Co-Founder of Metrist. “We shouldn’t have to wait for status pages to update with vague messages, if they are updated at all, and we certainly shouldn’t have to rely on Twitter for clues into the health of the critical services that run our businesses. At Metrist, we believe every developer deserves an easy way to know the status of any third-party service, with timely notifications and clear metrics that define the health of their cloud dependencies.”

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Metrist is also sharing details of $5.5m in seed funding. Heavybit, the leader in developer tool funding, led the company’s financing, with participation from Morado Ventures and other early-stage funds. Joining the round were notable angel investors in the space, including Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty, as well as Steve Klein and Scott Klein, co-founders of StatusPage.io.

“Modern applications depend on an ever-increasing number of cloud products managed by external vendors, but the overall approach to observability hasn’t changed. You wouldn’t dream of operating your internal services blindly and you need to manage your cloud dependencies with the same care,” said Joseph Ruscio, General Partner at Heavybit, on why they invested.

Ash Patel, Managing Director at Morado Venture Partners, had this to say: “Successfully managing a modern technology application stack is a data-driven business, and Metrist is positioned to own some of the most interesting data on what makes our digital world run. Ryan and Jeff’s backgrounds make them ideally suited to make cloud dependency management a reality.”

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