Tel Aviv-based Senser has emerged from stealth mode and announced a $9.5 million seed round led by Eclipse, with participation from Amdocs and other private investors. The company describes itself as an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to help developers and ops teams quickly identify the root causes of outages and service degradations.
The Power of eBPF
At its core, Senser utilizes the increasingly popular eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) technology to monitor a company’s infrastructure. eBPF is unique in that it runs inside the Linux kernel, allowing for seamless monitoring of networking and application traffic without significant overhead. This is not surprising, given the growing adoption of eBPF among observability companies.
Contextualizing Data
Senser CEO and co-founder Amir Krayden notes that collecting data is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in contextualizing it. "If you take the word observability, which implies something more contextual, can you have cognition about that? That cognition is what interests us: Can we save time by aiding the DevOps team or the site reliability teams with the ability to look at all this data and look for the unknowns that they’re facing?" Krayden explained.
Beyond Dashboards
Senser promises to move beyond traditional dashboards, providing users with a comprehensive map of their company’s overall infrastructure. This includes virtual machines in the cloud or on-premises, Kubernetes clusters, microservices, and more. Users can drill down as deep as needed, focusing on production environments.
The Founding Team
Krayden co-founded Senser with Yuval Levand Or Sadeh, two friends he had known for 16 years. All three were part of the Israel Defense Forces and later joined DriveNets, a large networking company. The trio worked together on building telco hardware routers with cloud-native technologies on top.
The Problem with Existing Tools
Krayden described the experience working at DriveNets as "an unholy matrimony between switches and Kubernetes." Debugging these complex systems was difficult with existing tools, leading to the idea of starting Senser. "We wanted to build something that would help us understand what’s going on in our infrastructure," Krayden said.
A New Approach
Senser’s approach is centered around using machine learning to quickly identify issues and provide actionable insights. This is a departure from traditional monitoring tools, which often rely on rules-based systems or manual analysis.
Growing Demand for Observability
The market for observability solutions is growing rapidly, driven by the increasing complexity of modern IT infrastructures. Companies like Senser are well-positioned to capitalize on this trend, offering innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of developers and ops teams.
Next Steps
With the $9.5 million seed round, Senser plans to expand its team and further develop its product offerings. The company is already seeing interest from potential customers and partners, and is poised for significant growth in the coming months.
About the Author
Frederic Lardinois is an editor at TechCrunch, covering enterprise, cloud, developer tools, Google, Microsoft, gadgets, transportation, and anything else that catches his attention. He owns just over a 50th of a bitcoin and has been known to dabble in robotics.