Today, Chronosphere is announcing its $200 million Series C and the preview of its distributed tracing product, marking the company’s extraordinary growth and technical progress.
I first wrote about our investment in Chronosphere two years ago when Greylock led the Series A. Since then, the company has executed with world class velocity and excellence, adding customers and revenue at one of the fastest rates I have seen. They have also hired an incredible engineering and go-to-market team. Most impressively, co-founders Rob Skillington and Martin Mao have demonstrated their talents as founders and leaders, leading the company through this hyperscale phase.
Chronosphere’s distributed tracing product brings observability to the next level. The job of observability is to know, triage, and understand the problems of a company’s application and infrastructure. Successful monitoring of these systems requires unified observability at scale. In releasing their distributed tracing product, Chronosphere addresses that need.
Until now, no one has been able to harness the power of distributed traces to deliver a solution that unlocks the method’s potential. With these breakthrough triage and root cause analysis capabilities, Chronosphere solves the challenges that organizations face when adopting distributed tracing – siloes, complexity, lack of context, unintuitive, and the prohibitive cost needed to maintain the system.
Chronosphere’s observability platform tightly links the metric and trace data collected from a cloud native environment. This way, the customer has the context and knowledge to quickly understand the significance of an issue with their application in the first place, then triage the problem, understanding the scope and systems impacted, and then finally understand the root causes of an issue or error so that they can best remediate the issue.
Humans navigate the world with our five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Since the pandemic hit, millions of people suffering from Covid learned what it meant to lose their sense of smell and taste. Increasingly, we appreciate how all of these senses combine and work together to let us navigate the world.
Historically, the cloud equivalent of these human senses have been the three “senses” of metrics, traces, and logs. There have been numerous companies and technologies focused on each of these elements. Just like our five human senses work together to let us observe, understand, and appreciate our surroundings and maneuver through them, the three cloud senses must collaborate to understand and triage the problems of a company’s applications. Furthermore, our senses, our nervous system is working and collecting data; likewise, Chronosphere is the only observability platform that allows customers to capture, store, and analyze every single trace. Chronosphere’s ability to handle high-cardinality data at massive scales – but at low cost – enables customers to keep all of their data.
Companies don’t need three separate vendors for each technology tackling traces, logs, and metrics; nor do they need a single company with three independent product offerings trying to glue everything together with the duct tape of a single dashboard. Observability to work best needs to work together. This is the vision of observability at scale.
Chronosphere, which is built on the open source M3 project from Uber, where Uber learned to use M3 as a central nervous system of intelligence and system of record for all cloud monitoring needs, thus creating unified observability (You can hear more about how they built the company in our conversation on the Greymatter podcast earlier this year). Building upon their world class strength in metrics, Chronosphere today is announcing their distributed tracing solution that will be integrated with their unified observability platform.
Finally, Chronosphere is also announcing their Series C investment led by our friends at General Atlantic with significant participation from Greylock, Lux, Addition and new investors Founders Fund and Spark Capital. This new round of capital will help the company grow into the next definitive cloud company and we are excited to be part of their journey!
