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Data observability — the practice of using software tools to provide a window into how an organization’s entire software suite, especially the most business-critical applications, is functioning — actually took root in the early computer era of the late 1950s, but it has renewed prominence in the generative AI era.
While observability platform vendors such as Splunk and Datadog have built multibillion-dollar businesses providing tools that help their enterprise customers organize all telemetry data — essentially, data that indicates the statuses of different processes, whether a program is functioning normally or not, and why — the truth is that many organizations are now finding themselves drowning in too much data and associated costs in the AI era.
Consider that Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, suggests that organizations should allocate 20 to 30% of their infrastructure budget to observability. And yet, a 2023 survey highlighted that 98% of companies have experienced unexpected increases in observability expenses, with 51% encountering overages on a monthly basis.
Now a new San Francisco startup Sawmills AI is here to sit between observability platforms such as Datadog and Splunk and their customers, using large language models (LLMs) and other clever new proprietary machine learning (ML) models to help consolidate, summarize, trim and ultimately reduce the amount of data sent from the customer to the vendor, while empowering the customer to retain all the original data and do with it what they will.
From left: Sawmills co-founders Amir Jakoby, Ronit Belson and Erez Rusovsky. Credit: Sawmills AI
“A lot of companies have more than one observability solution,” Ronit Belson, co-founder and CEO of Sawmills AI, explained in a video call interview with VentureBeat. “We strongly believe that telemetry data should be owned by the customer, not the observability vendors.”
Today, Sawmills AI emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding in an oversubscribed round led by the venture capital firm Team8 with participation from Mayfield and Alumni Ventures.
Co-founded by Belson, CTO Amir Jakoby and CPO Erez Rusovsky, the company is tackling the increasing costs of observability while improving data quality and reliability.
The company’s smart telemetry management platform enables businesses to fully harness the potential of their telemetry data at petabyte scale, but at a fraction of the cost.
“We …