The Coolest Data Observability Companies Of The 2023 Big Data 100

Part 6 of CRN’s 2023 Big Data 100 takes a look at the vendors solution providers should know in the data observability space.

Seeing Is Believing

Can you count on your data?

With so much riding on big data today, problems with data quality and reliability can be as disruptive to business operations as an IT system outage—or worse because the damage may not be discovered until after the fact, such as with a marketing campaign that failed due to faulty data.

That’s why there has been so much recent buzz over data observability tools and why it’s a category in this year’s Big Data 100.

Some data availability tools are focused on the data itself as part of an organization’s data operations (DataOps) initiative, monitoring and managing the quality and reliability of data, data pipelines and data infrastructure, and helping to investigate and remediate data-related problems. Such efforts are critical for maintaining high-quality data for internal operations, data engineering projects, and for building and operating data products and services.

Other observability systems collect data, including metric, trace and log machine data, from IT and operational systems and use it to monitor and manage the health and performance of those systems.

Data observability has certainly caught the attention of the major vendors. In June 2022 IBM acquired Databand.ai, an Israel-based data observability platform developer whose technology is used to understand the health of a organization’s data and identify and remediate data problems before they impact business operations.

As part of the CRN 2023 Big Data 100, CRN has compiled a list of data observability vendors that solution providers should be familiar with. They include established vendors such as Splunk and New Relic and startups such as Monte Carlo, Bigeye and Cribl.

This week CRN is running the Big Data 100 list in a series of slide shows, organized by technology category, spotlighting vendors of business analytics software, database systems, data warehouse and data lake systems, data management and integration software, data observability tools, and big data systems and cloud platforms.

Some vendors market big data products that span multiple technology categories. They appear in the slideshow for the technology segment in which they are most prominent.

Acceldata

CEO: Rohit Choudhary

The Acceldata platform provides comprehensive insight for data engineers and data managers Into an organization’s data stack to improve data and pipeline reliability, data system performance and spending efficiency, according to the company. The platform provides integrations with a long list of cloud data warehouses, cloud storage systems, relational databases and applications.

Acceldata announced the general availability of its data observability cloud solution in August 2022. In March the company enhanced the core platform with new data reliability functionality including no-code/low-code options, intelligent alerting, targeted recommendations and self-healing capabilities.

Based in Campbell, Calif., Acceldata raised $50 million in Series C funding in February, bringing its total financing to nearly $100 million.

Bigeye

CEO: Kyle Kirwan

Bigeye’s data observability system monitors the health of data pipelines and the quality of the data they contain to maintain data reliability and trustworthiness. The platform automates data quality management tasks by instrumenting data sets and data pipelines, applying metrics to monitor and measure data quality, detecting data anomalies and alerting data managers when problems arise.

In addition to the core data monitoring capability, the Bigeye platform performs actionable root cause and impact analysis for data lineage issues, and measures data deltas during data migration and replication operations.

San Francisco-based Bigeye raised $17 million in Series A and $45 million in Series B funding rounds in 2021.

Cribl

CEO: Clint Sharp

Cribl develops its products for IT operations and security managers whose systems generate machine data that can be collected, monitored and analyzed to maintain system and application performance and troubleshoot problems.

The company’s flagship Cribl Stream is a vendor-agnostic observability pipeline that collects, reduces, enriches, normalizes and routes data from any source to any destination within an IT environment. The company also offers Cribl Edge for collecting log, metric and application data, and Cribl Search for searching data in place without the need to collect and store it first.

Cribl raised $150 million in Series D funding in May 2022. In April of this year the company launched a major expansion of its partner program with new MSSP and professional service specializations, deal and revenue protection, and a revamped partner portal with new self-service capabilities.

DataKitchen

CEO: Christopher Bergh

DataKitchen, based in Cambridge, Mass., provides its DataOps Observability and DataOps Automation software to help businesses identify and fix problems across complex data analytics systems.

The company’s software allows data and analysis teams to observe, test and automate the data, tools and processes throughout their data analytics organization to improve quality, cycle time and productivity.

Grafana Labs

CEO: Raj Dutt

Grafana Labs develops open-source data observability, visualization and dashboard software, as well as commercial enterprise products such as the company’s Grafana Data Observability Platform for collecting and analyzing metric, log and trace data generated by IT infrastructure, networks, cybersecurity tools and other systems.

The company also offers the Grafana Cloud service, available through Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure marketplaces and —just this month—the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.

In March Grafana Labs acquired Pyroscope, developer of the popular Pyroscope open-source continuous profiling project.

In April 2022 Grafana Labs, based in New York, raised $240 million in Series D funding.

Monte Carlo

CEO: Barr Moses

How can a business guarantee the validity of data flowing through data pipelines? Monte Carlo, one of the leading companies in the data observability space, says the five pillars of observability needed to improve data reliability and eliminate data downtime are data quality, data freshness, data schema, data lineage and data volume.

The company’s Monte Carlo Data Observability platform provides a range of capabilities including machine learning-enabled data anomaly detection and alerting, data lineage problem resolution, and the ability to see data dependencies to prevent broken data.

San Francisco-based Monte Carlo has raised four rounds of funding including a $135 million Series D round in May 2022.

More recently the company unveiled the Data Reliability Dashboard and brought data observability to the data orchestration level through integration with Fivetran’s data movement and transformation platform.

New Relic

CEO: Bill Staples

New Relic develops a unified data observability platform that helps businesses collect telemetry data to monitor the performance of their IT systems, including applications, networks, infrastrure and Kubernetes containers. The company’s technology is used in a number of use cases including DevOps, cloud adoption, tool consolidation and digital customer experience management.

The company launched the New Relic Partner Stack partner program in June 2022 to provide more resources, benefits and opportunities for solution providers, service providers and MSPs in a move to encourage partners to become thought leaders in the observability space.

In January New Relic announced the general availability of Vulnerability Management, a new observability tool for managing security vulnerabilities.

Splunk

President, CEO: Gary Steele

Splunk markets one of the industry’s most widely used platforms for collecting, indexing and analyzing machine data, including log, metric and trace from IT and OT systems. While the Splunk platform is utilized for a broad range of use cases, the company has doubled down on observability and security in the past couple of years.

In addition to the flagship Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud Platform offerings, the company develops a number of observability applications including Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Application Performance Monitoring and Splunk IT Service Intelligence.

In March the company enhanced Splunk Observability Cloud with increased visibility and a more unified approach to incident response.

Sumo Logic

President, CEO: Ramin Sayar

Sumo Logic is another player in the data log monitoring and analytics space, targeting its core platform toward application observability, infrastructure monitoring and cloud security analytics use cases.

Earlier this month Sumo Logic debuted Predict for Metrics, software that provides a comprehensive way to more effectively harness observability analytics to predict variable usage and resource demands for applications and cloud systems.

Uravel Data

CEO: Kunal Agarwal

Uravel Data is focused on helping DataOps professionals maintain control of their cloud data. The vendor’s platform provides the observability capabilities that data teams need to gain visibility into their “data stack” and manage data performance for cloud migration initiatives and effectively operate data-intensive applications.

Unravel’s platform provides data teams with data quality management, data cost governance, data application optimization and troubleshooting capabilities.

Unravel raised $50 million in Series D funding in September 2022, financing the company said it would devote to accelerate development of the next generation of its DataOps observability technology.