Metrist, a startup that helps IT teams survive outages among the many cloud services they use to run their own applications, announced today that it has raised $5.5 million in seed funding from the likes of Heavybit, Morado Ventures and PagerDuty. Co-founder Alex Solomon and Status Page co-founders Scott and Steve Klein.
The general idea behind Metris is pretty straightforward, but there are surprisingly few companies that do this. While products like Twitter or StatusPage (now owned by Atlassian) allow companies to easily report issues with their services to their users, they don’t always reflect every problem and service breakdown – something that comes into play when it’s time to review. An SLA agreement or contract comes up for renewal and the two parties have very different perceptions of the reliability of the product. And while application performance monitoring and observability tools like New Relic or Honeycomb can provide you with some information, these services are inward-looking so their primary use is not the issue.
Image Credits: From m
“Apps today are built on top of other apps,” Metrist founder and CEO Jeff Martens told me. “This means that if one of them goes down or degrades or something goes wrong, your app and your business have the same chance. But current audiences don’t do anything special to those external dependencies — they’re still focused inward. You can know things about your external dependencies — not what you can’t.” – But the challenge will definitely be warranted so you take action but hold your vendors accountable.
More than anything else, Metrist wants to be the trusted independent player that buyers and sellers refer to when discussing termination. The service will be successful, Martens, when Metrists is contracted as a third-party independent verifier of the SLA.
“Too many events posted on StatusPage simply refer to upstream or third-party providers,” said Steve Klein, co-founder of StatusPage. “It’s exciting that Metrist is going after the root of the problem and creating visibility where it didn’t exist before.”
Metrist group
On the technical side, Metrist uses an agent, or eBPF, to gather information about the services a company runs, but it also regularly checks for downtime and service failures coming from 21 different cloud regions on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Out of the box, Metrist covers more than 100 services, but customers can host their own tests or use in-app tests. The team also points out that these tests go well beyond checking actual HTTP response code.
“Does this URL return 200 or 202?” It’s not just pinging like an API. “Say you’re hitting an endpoint and it needs to create something on that platform — we’ll call it a recovery API later to see how long it took to create that thing,” explained Metrist founder and CTO Ryan Duffield.
Customers get more flexibility in when and how they wake up about an issue. For some, a two percent late raise may not be acceptable, but for others that’s okay, e.g. Alerts can go to Slack, email, Datadog, or PagerDuty (and users can create their own alert systems using web hooks).
Image Credits: From m
While Metrist is announcing the funding today, it’s worth noting that the team raised this amount over two separate raises, including a pre-seed before the product was created. Both happened proactively, as Martens explained, without the team actually setting out to raise it. This was before the economy and funding changed.
“Modern applications depend on an increasing number of cloud products managed by external vendors, but the overall visibility approach hasn’t changed. You wouldn’t dream of running your internal services blindly, and you should manage your cloud dependencies with the same care,” said Joseph Ruscio, general partner at Heavybit. It allows them to proactively know when outsourcing is down, planning to eliminate or reduce it. A metric approach to third-party observability ensures teams know proactively when SLAs are not being met.
Metrist offers a free plan that allows you to monitor up to three services per day of data retention. Paid plans start at $99 per month for seven services and seven days of data retention.
