Alert administration for builders and ops groups might seem to be a solved drawback. Notifying an on-call engineer isn’t precisely troublesome anymore, in any case. However the actual query has turn into when to alert the best individual and learn how to assist them when a service goes down, for instance. Many are turning to AI to resolve a few of these points, together with Maintain.
The corporate gives an open supply model that makes use of a rule-based system, however what’s extra attention-grabbing is its paid enterprise providing, which additionally makes use of AI fashions to scale back notification fatigue by deduplicating and correlating alerts.
The Y Combinator-backed firm, which introduced a $2.5 million pre-seed spherical in the present day, leverages AI to assist ops groups handle and prioritize their alerts. The service aggregates knowledge from a wide range of monitoring instruments, prioritizes and manages alerts, after which helps these groups diagnose the problem that led it to get up the on-call engineer within the first place.
“We saw that observability platforms became more or less a commodity. They unified features. They gave great access to metrics, logs, etc.,” Maintain co-founder Matvey Kukuy advised me. “So you can access this data, but it’s really hard to interpret it — and especially interpret during hard times when something is happening. When you manage a large enterprise infrastructure, where something is always happening, you’re likely dealing with 1,000s of events.”
Maintain was initially co-founded by CEO Tal Borenstein and CTO Tal Glazner. The 2 first met 13 years in the past within the Israeli Protection Power’s Unit 8200 and stayed in contact ever since. Within the years since, Borenstein has labored on the cybersecurity abilities platform Cyberbit and compliance service Anecdotes, whereas Glazner labored at Cyberark earlier than reuniting along with his co-founder at Anecdotes. Earlier this yr, they introduced on Kukuy as their third co-founder. Earlier than becoming a member of Maintain, Kukuy was the CEO of Amixr, a startup that was constructing a product to compete with PagerDuty and which was later acquired by Grafana Labs.
At its core, Maintain is an integration service that pulls in knowledge from a broad number of infrastructure providers and observability instruments after which makes use of all of this knowledge to counterpoint the person alerts with extra context. Within the open supply model, that is principally completed through the use of Maintain’s workflow tooling to create triggers and their corresponding actions.
The corporate makes use of its AI platform on prime of this open supply tooling to monetize its service. Maintain’s AI fashions present assist for issues like noise discount, occasion correlation, and automatic root trigger evaluation, for instance. Like most different open supply startups, Maintain reserves some options like expanded knowledge retention, single sign-on assist, and personal deployments for its paying enterprise clients.
“We found this works surprisingly well because when enterprises try us, it’s very easy for [an engineer] to start with the open source and to deploy Keep — even on a laptop with the Docker compose or Kubernetes — and just see what Keep gives them out of the box and to see the value of it in two hours. We find that these folks become our champions in the organization,” Kukuy defined.
As for the aggressive surroundings, Maintain CEO Borenstein believes there’s at present a chance window for startups on this area that can stay open for an additional yr or two. He acknowledges that there are some “big, non-modern companies” working on this subject, however in his view the incumbent observability instruments most see alerting as a function inside their platform. And the AIOps startups that launched earlier at the moment are “locked into their old propositions.”
“The current AIOps market has a lot of potential but has been narrowed down technically to alerts due to early entrants that didn’t perform well product-wise and corrupted it,” Borenstein mentioned. “We believe the AIOps market has a lot of potential, and a new category is incoming based on intelligence layered on top of the observability stack.”
The corporate’s pre-seed spherical was led by Runa Capital, with participation from various undisclosed angels who beforehand constructed tech corporations in adjoining areas.
