Alert management to developers and operations teams may seem like a solved problem. After all, notifying an on-call engineer is no longer that difficult. But the real question is when to alert the right people and how to help them, for example if a service goes down. Many, including Keep, are turning to AI to solve some of these problems.
The company offers an open source version that uses a rules-based system, but more interestingly, it has a paid enterprise product that uses AI models to reduce notification fatigue by deduplicating and correlating alerts. is.
The Y Combinator-backed company, which today announced a $2.5 million pre-seed round, leverages AI to help operations teams manage and prioritize alerts. The service aggregates data from various monitoring tools, prioritizes and manages alerts, and helps your team diagnose the issue that woke up the on-call engineer in the first place.
Image credit:Keep
“We've seen observability platforms become more or less commoditized. They've unified functionality. They've provided better access to metrics, logs, etc.,” says Keep co-founder. Matvey Kukuy told me. “So we have access to this data, but it's very difficult to interpret it, especially in difficult times when something is happening. If you manage a large enterprise infrastructure, you're likely dealing with thousands of events.
Keep was originally co-founded by CEO Tal Borenstein and CTO Tal Glazner. The two first met 13 years ago in Israel Defense Forces Unit 8200 and have kept in touch ever since. Since then, Borenstein has worked at cybersecurity skills platform Cyberbit and compliance service Anecdotes, while Glazner worked at Cyberark before reuniting with his co-founders at Anecdotes. Earlier this year, they brought on Kukuy as their third co-founder. Prior to joining Keep, Kukuy served as CEO of Amixr. Amixr developed a product that competed with PagerDuty and was later acquired by Grafana Labs.
Image credit:Keep
At the core of Keep is an integration service that takes data from various infrastructure services and observability tools and uses all of this data to enrich individual alerts with more context. In the open source version, this is primarily done by using Keep's workflow tools to create triggers and corresponding actions.
The company uses an AI platform on top of this open source tool to monetize its services. Keep's AI models provide support for noise reduction, event correlation, automated root cause analysis, and more, for example. Like most other open source startups, Keep reserves some features, such as enhanced data retention, single sign-on support, and private deployment, for paying enterprise customers.
“When companies try us, they find that this works amazingly well because it’s so easy. [an engineer] Start with open source, deploy Keep (even on a laptop with Docker compose or Kubernetes), see what Keep has to offer out of the box, and see its value in 2 hours. We realized that these people became our advocates within the organization,” Kukui explained.
Image credit:Keep
In terms of the competitive environment, Keep CEO Borenstein believes there is currently an opportunity for startups in this space, which will remain open for another year or two. He acknowledges that there are some “large, non-modern companies” working in this space, but in his view, most existing observability tools limit alerts to within their own platforms. It is said that it is regarded as a function of And previously launched AIOps startups are now “stuck in the old proposition.”
“There's a lot of potential in the current AIOps market, but technically it's narrowed down to alerts because early entrants tainted the market with poor product performance,” Borenstein said. “We believe there is a lot of potential in the AIOps market, and new categories are emerging based on intelligence layered on top of the observability stack.”
The company's pre-seed round was led by Runa Capital, with participation from a number of undisclosed angels who have previously founded technology companies in the region.