StackState

About StackState

StackState provides an observability platform for complex, cloud-native, and hybrid IT environments, primarily serving large enterprises in sectors such as finance, telecommunications, and IT services. The company's business model revolves around a subscription-based service for its AIOps platform, which is designed to give clients a unified, real-time view of their entire IT stack, from infrastructure to business services.

The company originated in 2014 from a consulting project at a major Dutch bank where founders Mark Bakker and Lodewijk Bogaards were tasked with resolving persistent performance issues in critical applications. They identified that the core problem was not a lack of monitoring data but the absence of an integrated view that could connect data silos. This led to the idea of a "time-traveling topology"—a dynamic map of an IT environment's dependencies that could be rewound to pinpoint the root cause of failures. After prototyping and receiving positive feedback, they founded StackState in 2015, officially launching in 2017 with a platform built on a custom versioned graph database. In June 2024, StackState was acquired by SUSE to be integrated into the Rancher platform as its primary observability engine.

StackState's platform addresses the challenge of managing highly complex and dynamic IT landscapes by ingesting and correlating data from various sources, including metrics, logs, events, and traces. Its core feature is the 4T Data Model, which combines Topology, Telemetry, Tracing, and Time to create a comprehensive, contextualized view. Key functionalities include auto-discovery of all components and their dependencies, which are visualized in real-time dependency maps. This allows Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), developers, and IT managers to understand relationships across their stack, accelerate troubleshooting, and reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). The platform also offers guided remediation with step-by-step playbooks and integrates with notification channels like Slack and PagerDuty to streamline incident response.