Serverless monitoring startup Espagon expands to cover broader microservices

When Espagon launched last Fall, the Israeli startup had an idea to monitor serverless, architectures, specifically AWS Lambda. But the company didn’t want to confine itself to monitoring a narrow class of applications, and today it announced it is now able to monitor a broader set of microservice development approaches.

CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira says when it launched, the startup wanted to take aim at serverless and Lambda seemed to be the prime tool for doing that. “Our product was basically a tracing, troubleshooting and monitoring tool that was automatically doing all of that for the Lambda ecosystem. And and since then, we’ve seen actually a bigger shift [beyond] just Lambda,” he said.

That shift was to a broader view of this kind of deployment across a set of modern applications involving microservices. When developers move to these modern approaches, it becomes impossible to launch an agent to help monitor what’s happening. Yet the developers still need visibility into the applications.

To help, the company is launching a tracing and logging tool together, a first for this type of monitoring, according to Shapira. “Today, with engineering and DevOps working closer than ever, being able to automatically trace microservices applications without using an agent and combine the tracing and the logging in one platform is extremely valuable,” he said.

Shapria says that over time the company plans to expand this idea and support more frameworks out of the box to allow this kind of open tracing across different tools. “We need to provide support for more and more frameworks becoming popular. Lambda is just one framework,” he explained.

Serverless is somewhat of a misnomer. The servers are still there, but instead of programming to launch on a particular server, virtual machine (VM) or set of VMs, the cloud infrastructure vendor provides whatever infrastructure resources a developer requires at any given moment automatically.

Microservices encompass the idea that instead of building a monolithic application, you break it down into a series of smaller services, typically launching them in containers and orchestrating the containers in a tool like Kubernetes.

The company only came out of stealth last October, so it’s still early days, but it is already expanding, opening a sales office in the US with a 4-person staff. The engineering team remains in Israel. It is approaching 20 employees in total.

Shapria wouldn’t talk about exact customer numbers, but says the company has hundreds of users now and is doubling the number of paying customers every month.