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A few years ago, we set out to rebuild server and log monitoring from the ground up. Today marks a new and exciting chapter in the story. To tell it properly, let me take you back to a simpler time: the year 2005.
I had just co-founded Writely — “The Web Word Processor!” — and usage was skyrocketing. We ran the whole thing on four leased servers in Texas. It was the clunkiest setup you’d ever seen, but there were few moving parts and it wasn’t much trouble to manage.
Within a year, we were acquired by Google, merged with a spreadsheet app, renamed “Google Docs”, and relaunched on Google infrastructure. The new system was infinitely more scalable, but quite complex. We depended on a slew of independent services: load balancing, data storage, user identity, email, spell checking, and more.
Every day brought a new production issue to be painstakingly investigated. Our pager was going off daily, where before it had gone off — well, twice: one false alarm, and one billing issue with the pager company. To keep up, we were looking at log files, system metrics, application metrics, error reports, and more. We were juggling 17 different tools for operational visibility, each its own flavor of clunky, slow, or just plain frustrating.
Contrast this with the Google search experience. You have one place to look for everything, and answers are instant. We asked ourselves, why should searching a server log be so much slower than searching the entire web? Google showed the world that speed and simplicity make a real difference. We’re bringing that difference to system operations.
We’ve built a unique architecture that brings massive parallelism to bear on every search, summarizing gigabytes of data in the blink of an eye. That allows us to combine system monitoring, application monitoring, log aggregation and analysis, external probing, alerting, dashboards, error tracking, and more — in a single, integrated, fast cloud service. You can check it out here.
Today we’re excited to announce an outstanding group of investors who share our vision. We’ve closed our first round of external funding: $2.1M, led by Susa Ventures, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, Google Ventures, and Sherpalo Ventures. We’re excited to bring Scalyr to a wider audience. There are 50,000,000 servers in the world, and every one of them needs monitoring.
And the inevitable corollary: we’re looking for a few strong engineers — frontend, backend, and devops — to join us. Want to be part of an awesome founding team (and draw a real salary while you’re at it)? Curious enough to read more? Stop by https://www.scalyr.com/careers.
