Stackdriver

About Stackdriver

Stackdriver was established in 2012 by Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri, two former colleagues from VMware, with the objective of delivering unified monitoring across the multiple layers of cloud computing through a single Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. The founders' background in virtualization and cloud infrastructure at VMware provided them with the insights to address the growing complexities faced by DevOps teams. The company's business model was centered on providing a subscription-based monitoring-as-a-service platform to companies operating in the cloud.

The firm secured its initial Series A funding of $5 million in July 2012, led by Bain Capital Ventures, followed by a $10 million Series B round in 2013 with participation from Flybridge Capital Partners. A public beta of the product was launched in April 2013. Stackdriver's platform was designed to help DevOps teams monitor performance, diagnose issues, and receive alerts for applications running on public cloud infrastructure, primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS) but also Google Cloud Engine and Rackspace. Key features included Rapid Stack Discovery for mapping system resources, Stack Scanner for analytics and anomaly detection, and Elastic Monitoring for dynamic resources.

The company's trajectory culminated in its acquisition by Google in May 2014, for an undisclosed amount, just two years after its founding. Following the acquisition, the Stackdriver team and its technology were integrated into the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to bolster its native monitoring capabilities. The service was expanded and rebranded as Google Stackdriver, launching in general availability in October 2016, offering unified monitoring, logging, and diagnostics for both GCP and AWS. In 2020, Google further integrated the toolset, ending the use of the Stackdriver brand and folding its functionalities into what is now known as the Google Cloud Operations suite.