Collaborative notebooks
for debugging incidents
Our investment in Fiberplane
We at Northzone are proud to announce a new seed-stage investment in Fiberplane, the first observability platform that brings a collaborative, declarative, notebook-based approach to resolving outages and coordinating work around SRE (Site reliability engineering) incidents. This news is a great opportunity to speak about observability software, and explain why we backed the company.
In 2020, many companies invested in tools that identify and escalate when problems arise, including monitoring and logging (e.g., Datadog), alerting and incident response (e.g., PagerDuty), and issue tracking (e.g., Jira). With these tools firmly in place, the focus can now shift to mitigating incidents before they happen and increasing resilience after they do.
Products like Framer and Figma have allowed designers to collaboratively create high-fidelity prototypes and designs; Notion helps entire companies organize their knowledge base and processes; Pitch makes working on team presentations easy and flexible. Interestingly, DevOps tools and services have seen little to no love from this move towards collaboration.
Observability helps developers understand multi-layered architectures: what’s slow, what’s broken, why it’s happening, and how to fix it. Despite all the tools available, troubleshooting at runtime is incredibly hard. Diagnosing anything requires metrics and successful debugging needs context. Yet, tools around observability and monitoring remain siloed environments with only a single user in mind. This leads to longer resolution times and lots of unnecessary silos which make it hard to build a knowledge base from past incidents. It often takes hours from incident to resolution, and network downtime costs enterprises on average between $140K to $540K p/hour.
Fiberplane is changing that, starting with incident resolution.
Enter Fiberplane, the “collaborative war room” for DevOps
Fiberplane provides SREs with context around each incident, ready for collaborative debugging as the incident unfolds. This allows SREs and DevOps to collaborate and coordinate work around an incident whilst building a structured knowledge base that will present teams with correlated incidents and resolutions in the future.
The result is an elegant solution for real-time debugging and workflow automation. By bringing collaboration into the DevOps environment, Fiberplane can increase productivity and significantly reduce the delta between incident and resolution — a welcome solution to a longstanding pain.
Why is it exciting?
- IT environments are becoming more complex, which means more projects will need to be monitored. Kubernetes and microservices have been a blessing in some ways and a curse of complexity in others. As cloud-native computing shifts the paradigm of enterprise IT, the observability component reflects new ways of leveraging technology to manage this increasingly complex IT infrastructure. Furthermore, today’s massive multi- and hybrid cloud deployments require new engineering skills, hence the surge in demand for site reliability engineers.
- Fiberplane is in a unique position to define collaborative SRE as a category: Fiberplane allows for a much more enjoyable, collaborative developer experience between SRE and DevOps. It is beautifully set up to become a new system of record and history where executable run-books can be stored, providing a unified overview of insights into metrics, logs, traces, and integrations. SREs can automatically generate actionable intelligence for real-time debugging in notebooks and maintain the context of metrics, including a timeline view of annotations and snapshot data.
- With the growing importance of reliability, Fiberplane’s software has become mission-critical: Observability is an evergreen area where collective revenue will only grow as subsequent waves of value creation emerge. Since reliability has big implications for operating margins for software service vendors, we believe enterprises will pay substantial licenses for advanced observability tools. Understanding when and where you can limit your investments in reliability has bottom-line impacts. Consequently, the question of reliability has escalated to C-level decision-makers.
- The founding team is incredible, with an ambitious vision led by Mies. Together, they have hands-on experience building open-source projects and customer-facing DevOps services. Mies previously built Wercker, a CI/CD platform that was sold to Oracle in 2017, where he experienced first-hand the pain of managing incident resolution across platforms. We believe Mies and his team have the skill and ambition to drive Fiberplane to success and we’re excited to support them on their journey.
Welcome to the Northzone Family, Mies, and team! We’re excited to join forces with Fiberplane alongside Crane, Notion Capital, System One and Base Case Capital.
