Today, we are excited to announce the launch of the free offering of Telescope – the first free OpenTelemetry-native SaaS platform for troubleshooting cloud-native applications.
4 and a half years ago, I co-founded Epsagon together with my partner Ran Ribenzaft (CTO). We were on a mission to provide intuitive and easy-to-setup observability for development teams working with cloud and microservices technologies. Our journey was one of the best experiences of my life – growing the company from an idea to a business with hundreds of customers, from high-growth startups to large enterprises. The team grew as well, from being an Israel-based engineering team to a global organization with several offices.
A little over 6 months ago, Epsagon joined Cisco to lead its new Full-Stack Observability line of products – a strategic initiative intended to make Cisco one of the top players in the world when it comes to observability. We joined the ET&I group – Emerging Technologies and Incubations, where our team has the freedom to develop this new product and technology.
We quickly realized that many of the things we did in Epsagon were extremely relevant and useful to our mission inside of Cisco, and some were not. Together with the existing Cisco team, we realized several key things about the future of cloud-native observability:
- It must be easy to use, since maintaining developer velocity is key.
- It must be open-source compatible with a free offering. Specifically, we chose to use OpenTelemetry, since it is the most popular and fastest-growing project in observability.
- It must be suitable for both startups and large enterprises.
With this understanding in mind, we embarked on a journey to build Telescope, aiming to first launch it as a free self-service offering, allowing developers anywhere to deeply understand their applications with little effort.
Once a development team is set up with Telescope, they can easily query any span in their applications, as well as all its structured data. This allows them to ask any question – simple or sophisticated – to troubleshoot any issue, whether in production, staging, or development. This increases both their development speed and customer experience since customer-facing issues can be resolved very quickly.
How do you get started with Telescope? It couldn’t be simpler! Just try it right here.
