investment

Metrist raises $5.5M for eBPF-based cloud monitoring

cloud monitoing, investment, monitoring, network observability, startup

Metrist, a startup with DevOps roots, raises $5.5M to help companies to deal with cloud services outages. Metrist was founded by two DevOps veterans, Jeff Martens and Ryan Duffield, whose past experience includes working for New Relic, PagerDuty and similar observability and monitoring companies.

Metrist Founders
Metrist Founders, Image Credit: Metrist

Metrist’s idea is not very original: negotiate outages that vendors’ SLAs do not cover. Surprisingly, there are not too many competitors in this area. Some competition for Metrist’s business comes from Parametric Insurance, which sells insurance policies that include cloud and CDN outages.

In contrast to selling insurance, Metrist is willing to play the role of the trusted arbiter in negotiating outage outcomes with vendors and the affected company.

One of the interesting parts of this story is that according to TechCrunch report Metrist team plans to run an eBPF agent to gather data services a customer runs. There are a few issues associated with this technical approach:

  1. Metrist is going to miss all container deployments, e.g. ECS at AWS or any K8s+dockers infrastructure. It is quite a big part of cloud infrastructure that Metrist won’t be able to observe with eBPF-based agents.
  2. On top of that, eBPF can not see into Serverless deployments, e.g. AWS Lambda-s. This further reduces the world of apps that Metrist can monitor.
  3. And there is a third factor that limits Metrist scale-up: most enterprises become very suspicious once they are asked to run yet another agent on their cloud VM or a barrel metal machine. While companies like PageDuty or New Relic have already overcome this psychological barrier by being on the market for long enough, it still could be a showstopper for a young startup that needs to prove itself to its customers.

Having said this, we wish the Metrist’s team all the success.

Yet Another Investment in a Cloud Network Monitoring and Cyberdefense Startup

cloud monitoing, cybersecurity, investment, network observability, startup

SynSaber has recently announced a $13 million series A investment. SynSaber is an early-stage cybersecurity and network monitoring company that develops OT visibility and detection solutions for machine learning cloud monitoring and network observability. SynSaber develops vendor-agnostic software for critical cloud and edge infrastructure that allows sending OT data to empower SIEM, SOAR, or MSSP. Cloud edge assets are often targeted by cybercriminals and SynSaber provides a new line of defense and a solution for intelligent cloud monitoring on the edge.

The latest round brings total investment in the startup to $15.5 million. SynSaber is well positioned on the industrial asset and cloud edge and network monitoring market. The company expands its global footprint and gains market momentum.

SynSyber’s  H1-2022 report shows the efficiency of the startup’s solution, which uncovers that 13% of CVEs reported in 2022 have no patch or fix currently available from the vendor, while 34% of CVEs could only be patched after a firmware update. Furthermore, 23% of CVEs require local or physical access to the system. These numbers demonstrate the growing need for sophisticated fully automated machine learning cloud monitoring solutions for edge computing, hybrid and private clouds. Intelligent computing edge and cloud monitoring help timely detect infrastructure issues, including security flaws and misconfiguration issues, and fix them before they are exploited by cybercriminals.