AWS is an experienced cloud provider with a sophisticated marketplace for cloud services. The AWS platform offers the users the ability to build and run virtually any type of application or backend service at scale, without having to provision, manage, and scale servers. Born in the cloud and focused on AWS, Epsagon, integrates with a multitude of AWS services, including AWS Lambda and Amazon CloudWatch, along with other management services, programming languages and API-level integrations. Epsagon is the first provider of distributed tracing for AWS AppSync without any code changes. The company is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner with DevOps and Data and Analytics competencies and AWS Lambda Layers Launch Partner. It is sold in the AWS marketplace and directly to customers. A subscription-based SaaS service, Epsagon offers several service tiers from free trials to enterprise.
Epsagon, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, was established by the co-founder duo Nitzan Shapira and Ran Ribenzaft to overcome the challenges encountered during monitoring and troubleshooting cloud microservices, both containers and serverless.
Helping Client’s Tackle the Challenges
Epsagon delivers automated distributed tracing with unique payload visibility for cloud microservices. Currently, Epsagon provides distributed and automated tracing of every request in a transaction and integrated logging and tracing in a single interface with payload visibility that enables you to fix issues in seconds rather than days and weeks. The solution is wholly automated for DevOps/Engineering and provides a better way to manage applications in complex cloud environments. Highly distributed, cloud-native applications with their many components are hard to monitor, troubleshoot and fix. Agent-based APM solutions do not run well in cloud-native environments where you run workloads using managed services such as AWS Lambda or Fargate. When monitoring cloud applications using only logs or even log aggregators, finding the root cause of problems and fixing issues is highly manual. Even open tracing frameworks such as OpenTracing/OpenCensus require extensive training, manual implementation, and maintenance. Finally, a lack of tool automation hinders rapid monitoring and troubleshooting of cloud apps.
Overcoming the Current Challenges with an Automated Approach
After utilizing the Epsagon platform, users have reported a 95% reduction in troubleshooting time and a 75% reduction in errors. The users such as Mutual of Enumclaw and Via rely completely on Epsagon monitoring and troubleshooting with its automated, distributed approach.
“Epsagon has become one of those pillars for our cloud migration around which we are building our software. It gives us such an advantage in terms of debugging capabilities and supporting applications that we could not get anywhere else. Epsagon works with you to accomplish your goals as a company.” – Nikody Keating, Cloud Architect at Mutual of Enumclaw.
“When it comes to monitoring and troubleshooting, we completely rely on Epsagon and its automated approach.” – Ynon Cohen, Development Group Manager at Via
Empowering the Teammates
Epsagon’s success is built on a diverse global team with extensive expertise in technology at major tech companies. This team consists of experts across R&D, engineering, marketing and sales. The company promotes entrepreneurship from the bottom up, i.e., the team is encouraged to make decisions, take ownership and deliver results. Every team member has “a voice” in team meetings and decisions. Epsagon is people-centric, which company leaders believe is the reason behind its success.
Introducing the Automated Approach
Today computing is becoming more and more distributed and cloud-native. According to Nitzan Shapira (Co-founder and CEO), traditional tracing systems were designed particularly for monolithic applications. With cloud, there was a need for a new approach to monitoring and troubleshooting.
With an automated and distributed tracing approach, Nitzan with his partner Ran Ribenzaft (Co-founder and CTO) established Epsagon in 2017 with funding from by Lightspeed Venture Partners and StageOne Ventures.
“If I could do it again, I’d probably be an entrepreneur sooner. I started my company as I turned 30 and left the Israeli Army Elite Intelligence Unit. I plan to have more than one company before I’m done.”
Companies should consider innovating with automation that can “disrupt” traditional but ineffective technology approaches, Nitzan advised. The ease of automated, distributed tracing as well as visibility into the deepest levels of cloud environments will translate into superior customer experiences, he added.
Enhancing the Existing Application Performance
The Epsagon solution utilizes an automated, distributed tracing approach that enables end-to-end monitoring, metrics and analysis, and troubleshooting. Epsagon’s payload visibility provides more troubleshooting information than any monitoring metric currently available today.
As a result, engineers and DevOps working at the cutting-edge of cloud can fix the issues in seconds and speed faster, better performing apps and services to users. The solution can co-exist and enhance existing application performance monitoring solutions. Today cloud and automation are profoundly shaping customer application usage and improving applications that are considered biz-critical for companies like Via. Epsagon is driving the adoption of automated, distributed tracing approach and is seeing more mainstream companies that are adopting cloud and automated monitoring solutions.
