The A series was led by Zeev Ventures joined by previous investors Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe Ventures. The funds will be used for further product development. Founded in 2021, groundcover uses eBPF to help teams monitor their K8s applications effortlessly, at scale, by pinpointing bleeding issues and providing insights to solve them much faster.
Giant companies lead the APM sector
APM (Application Performance Monitoring) is a technology that has been around for a decade, yet it has become infeasible for many companies needing application monitoring today: it is hard to integrate, impossible to scale, and offers an expensive full-blown tracing system, or nothing at all. Estimated at over $50 billion, observability is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets in infrastructure software, with teams willing to allocate up to 10% of their IT spend to observability.
Giant companies have been leading the APM sector, yet due to growing data volumes and intricate technology stacks, the cost has risen and these solutions have become hard to integrate and demanding to maintain. The result is clear: over 70% of teams do not have an APM tier in place (DevOps Pulse 2022). eBPF was first introduced in 2014 and allows programs to run directly in an isolated virtual machine inside the Linux kernel. In the last 24 months, eBPF has evolved to solve new use cases, becoming the next great promise in fields like network infrastructure, security and observability.
Every code crashes
groundcover utilizes eBPF to provide deep Kubernetes observability, using it to trace any type of event – from network and infrastructure, all the way to services and applications running in the user space. By using eBPF to collect observability data straight from the Linux kernel, groundcover requires no R&D efforts in the process. Together with a unique edge-compute approach to collect data efficiently, groundcover covers everything yet stores only what matters. The result is super-granular yet scalable visibility into what’s really happening inside a Kubernetes cluster.
Shahar Azulay, CEO and Co-Founder of groundcover said,
« The APM space is thirsty for innovation and I am psyched to be introducing eBPF into this space. We are so confident that groundcover redefines observability, that we’ve taken the unconventional approach of offering a robust free tier from day one. groundcover breaks the visibility-cost tradeoff, ensuring teams don’t have to compromise on visibility depth to manage budgets responsibly. We’ve made it our mission to allow them to get the most out of APM at a fraction of the existing cost in the market today. »
groundcover exposes the root cause of the code crashes instantly by monitoring 100% of the production stack covering every application, legacy code, side car or 3rd party component, with no blind spots. groundcover taps into all application logs, metrics, traces and Kubernetes events with zero code changes and instantaneous integration.