The rising cost of observability—a key element in maintaining complex cloud architectures—has pushed organizations to seek more efficient solutions. Enter Dash0, a startup aiming to alleviate “bill shock” associated with observability tools like Datadog, without necessarily slashing costs outright.
Observability’s Cost Crisis
As organizations increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure, observability has become their second-largest cloud expense after provisioning. For instance, Coinbase reportedly spent $65 million on its Datadog bill. With systems becoming more intricate and service reliability paramount, businesses are caught between needing observability and managing its high costs.
Dash0, founded by Mirko Novakovic, offers an alternative approach to tackle this challenge, emphasizing cost transparency and leveraging the open-source observability framework OpenTelemetry (OTel).
A Transparent and Open Approach
Dash0 aims to improve how observability expenses are understood and managed. By fully utilizing OpenTelemetry’s capabilities, such as Semantic Conventions, Dash0 provides real-time insights into which services, developers, or applications are driving observability costs.
While other tools like Signoz also claim to be OTel-native, Dash0 distinguishes itself with its focus on usability and transparency.
Backed by Experience and Funding
Dash0 raised $9.5 million in seed funding, led by Accel, with participation from Dig Ventures. Novakovic’s previous success with Instana, a company acquired by IBM for $500 million in 2020, likely bolstered investor confidence. The Dash0 team includes several former Instana members, with a total of 21 employees, 19 of whom are engineers.
Making OpenTelemetry More Accessible
Though OpenTelemetry has existed since 2019, Novakovic acknowledges that it is not yet as user-friendly as proprietary solutions. Dash0’s focus is on enhancing OTel’s usability by offering intuitive dashboards, Slack integrations, and simplified installation processes comparable to Datadog’s.
Dash0’s first customers will be organizations with 50 to 5,000 employees, a market where observability costs are often disproportionately high.
Future Plans
Currently prioritizing product development over aggressive sales and marketing, Dash0 plans to expand its tech and product teams, including hiring a developer relations specialist to drive OpenTelemetry adoption. The startup also aims to collaborate with other OTel-related projects, such as Perses and PromQL, to refine the observability ecosystem further.
A Community-Driven Vision
Dash0 envisions creating a vendor-agnostic observability standard that combines the openness of OpenTelemetry with the usability of proprietary tools. By addressing the “missing parts” of the framework, the company hopes to lead a community effort to make observability both transparent and cost-effective.
As Dash0 launches publicly, its approach could resonate with organizations seeking clarity and control over their observability investments without compromising on functionality.
