The AIOps platform Senser describes itself as using machine learning to make it easier for development and operations teams to pinpoint the reasons for failures and service degradation. Today’s Tel Aviv-based business came out of hiding and revealed a $9.5 million seed round led by Eclipse and included Amdocs and other private investors.
Senser primarily uses the eBPF technology to monitor a company’s infrastructure, which is growing in popularity. Because eBPF runs inside the Linux kernel, it can readily view all networking and application traffic without incurring a considerable amount of additional overhead. Given its advantages, it is no surprise that many observability companies are placing their bets on this technology. Sensor relies on artificial intelligence to offer a competitive edge in an increasingly crowded sector.
The CEO and co-founder of Senser, Amir Krayden, observed that amassing a lot of data is one thing, but contextualizing it is quite another. Take the word observability, which suggests something more contextual. We can save time by assisting the DevOps or site reliability teams to analyze all this data and search for the unknowns they are running into. Failures eventually happen because humans are not very adept at constructing faultless dashboards. “The teams are very used to defining dashboards,” he said.
Senser promises to go beyond dashboards and give users access to a map of the organization’s overall infrastructure, including virtual machines in the cloud or on-premises, Kubernetes clusters, microservices, etc. With the ability to drill down as far as necessary and a focus on production environments.
Krayden founded Senser with Yuval Lev and Or Sadeh. Like many Israeli company owners, the three had been close friends for sixteen years and served in the Israel Defense Forces together. The three joined DriveNets, a sizable, well-funded networking firm. Three of the startup’s original ten employees created routers for telcos utilizing cloud-native technologies as the top layer. Unsurprisingly, using the tools to debug such sophisticated systems was difficult; Krayden referred to it as “an unholy matrimony between switches and Kubernetes.”
The three had always planned to launch their own business, and DriveNets CEO Ido Susan, who later invested in Senser, encouraged them in this. After working at DriveNets for almost six years,
Lev said, “We knew we wanted to launch our own startup or product company. Then, there was an opportunity to launch Sensor and nail into something that hurt us so severely that we felt we had to act.”
Senser claims it will considerably simplify operations teams’ tasks and lessen alert fatigue. Krayden said, “You will be alerted for every anomaly in the system with existing tools.” “In a distributed system, you receive alerts for various reasons. While you should be alerted about a system event, you shouldn’t be for a symptom. The company’s systems should ideally explain why you should be concerned and what went wrong every time you receive an alert from Senser. The user can then see exactly how Senser arrived at those findings thanks to the service, and Krayden claimed that explainability may be its most crucial component.
“Industrial 4.0 apps must run reliably on clients and edge locations to power the foundation of physical industries,” said Eclipse’s founding partner. “Industrial 4.0 apps, such as warehouse automation or robotics, and outdoor mapping apps like drones.” According to the statement, “Senser is ensuring these apps are working at the highest levels while eliminating difficulties — including the eye-popping expense of configuration and maintenance and the lack of meaningful insights — in a creative approach.
Senser now employs 17 employees and is expanding quickly. Unlike many other seed-stage startups, Senser is already hiring for numerous marketing positions, mainly in the US. It is a result of the current market. Marketing is becoming increasingly important. According to Krayden, it’s becoming more crucial in this game to produce an engaging story and share your work with the public early on, in addition to having a high-quality product.
