Lumigo joins race to fill serverless observability gap

Lumigo, a company that aims to plug a gap in serverless monitoring, has announced new features to do just that. The company has also announced its latest capital injection of $29 million in a series A round of funding.

Serverless computing has exploded in popularity as of late because it allows IT departments to run code without thinking about servers. Cloud providers run the servers responsible for the application, and IT pays the provider for only the time they consume.

But how does IT monitor the performance of those applications? In serverless monitoring, the infrastructure comprises transient functions which are restricted within proprietary boundaries. So installing monitoring agents to perform logging and tracing analysis is challenging.

These challenges have given birth to serverless monitoring tools like Lumigo, Epsagon, or the Splunk Observability Suite.

Lumigo’s visual map

Lumigo says it can now monitor containers, Kubernetes, and virtual machines. Both containers and full-fledged virtual machines are now part of Lumigo’s hybrid distributed apps. Lumigo can track service-wise requests inside these apps. It can track latency issues and locate and fix hard-to-reproduce bugs.

Lumigo’s distributed tracing is a one-click solution for developers to seamlessly find and fix issues in serverless and microservices environments. Developers at a host of companies, including Medtronic, Fortinet, Berlitz, Optibus, Symantec, Allianz, leverage the services of Lumigo.

With a virtual stack trace of all services participating in the transaction, Lumigo displays everything in a visual map. It does not need any manual code changes to visualize the entire environment. While you can see the end-to-end execution duration of each service, Lumigo identifies your worst latency offenders. The successful leveraging of machine learning allows Lumigo to preempt issues and raise alerts. Resultantly, the cost implications of these issues remain low.

Several contenders of Lumigo match its capabilities. Epsagon, for instance, builds its services on the notion of distributed tracing. Similar to Lumigo, its AI-powered methods can preempt and neutralize issues before it occurs by raising relevant alerts. Similarly, Splunk’s Observability Suite offers end-to-end observability for serverless applications through tracing and automated incident response mechanisms. Its architecture of microservices makes real-time visibility and performance monitoring a reality.

Overall, these tools help close the serverless-observability gap to a large extent by bringing in a mix of manual and automated observation techniques. The developers can spend more time on writing functional code without having to worry about writing instrumentation. And these are the benefits that are motivating investors to get increasingly involved in companies like Lumigo.

This is the second funding for Lumigo after it had its initial seed round of $8 million two years ago.