Heavybit Welcomes New Member: Metrist

We’re thrilled to announce our investment in and welcome our newest portfolio company, Metrist, which gives developer teams unprecedented, real-time visibility into their cloud dependencies to improve their observability capabilities, address outages more effectively, and increase accountability from their vendors.

Modern, cloud-native applications are built out of increasingly granular components delivered and operated by third-party vendors, covering everything from basic cloud infrastructure to payment services, telephony, and beyond. High-performing teams know that spending time and energy on anything that isn’t a core competency reduces the likelihood of their organization's success and often incorporate dozens of external cloud dependencies to accelerate their feature velocity. There’s no free lunch, however, and the tradeoff made (besides payment for services rendered, obviously) is a lack of control and insight into how those dependencies are maintained and operated. Failure or impairment of these upstream dependencies usually manifests as outright downtime or poor user experience for your customers.

Metrist directly addresses the challenge of cloud dependencies by focusing specifically on monitoring and observability for these third-party vendor applications. Metrist’s powerful platform combines centralized cloud dependency health tracking, real-time alerting, and detailed metrics to help software providers better understand where and how they affect performance, address outages faster, and identify nascent issues before external vendors have even managed to update their status pages.

The data drives home how big a problem this is, as third-party cloud dependencies are increasingly the cause of outages, reportedly causing 71% of all public outages. And when an external cloud dependency goes down, leading to an outage within your product, now your SLAs are suddenly the ones in jeopardy, and your customers are the ones angrily calling you and demanding a response. Reports suggest that modern outages now cost businesses upwards of $300K per hour.

Unfortunately, conventional observability tools have limited capabilities to quickly and accurately diagnose and triage these incidents as they typically focus on first-party and second-party code, rather than the cloud dependencies that are increasingly the culprits.

Metrist has stepped in to tackle the cloud dependency challenge with a platform that performs both outside-in functional testing and inside-out app monitoring. With Metrist, software companies whose uptimes depend on third-party services can resolve issues faster and keep end customers happier using Metrist’s real-time view of their performance. Unlike status pages, Metrist alerts users to issues immediately as they occur, not hours later after executives and lawyers have approved public updates. No more “finding out through Twitter.” No more wondering, “Is it me, or is it them?”

With this investment, Metrist will continue to grow its team and scale its go-to-market. Learn more about Metrist or sign up for a free account now. You can also learn more about Metrist’s approach to third-party dependencies at Heavybit’s DevGuild community event on incident management.

Meet the Founders

Ryan Duffield | CTO

Ryan Duffield is an engineer-turned-product leader who pioneered observability and incident management platforms for companies such as Server Density, PagerDuty, and Netdata – as one of the first hires at each. Ryan is responsible for developing open-source monitoring agents for Server Density and ensured PagerDuty could scale to billions of events per year for their world-class customers, before serving as VP of Product for Netdata. His work building and maintaining PagerDuty’s outside-in cloud dependency monitoring is just part of what inspired him to bring the same visibility to the world through Metrist. Ryan is from Toronto, has a Computer Science degree from the University of Windsor, and is currently based in San Francisco.

Jeff Martens | CEO | LinkedIn

Jeff Martens has built observability products for developers for over 12 years. He founded his first company, CPUsage (a pioneer in the serverless computing space before AWS Lambda existed) before joining New Relic pre-IPO. There, he served on the team creating the company’s high-performance event database, then took over New Relic Browser and grew it into the company’s second-largest product. Jeff then joined PagerDuty pre-IPO where he worked on designing, building, and launching a suite of business analytics products. Jeff is an alumnus of the University of Oregon and works between Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area.