Allytics Tech Perspectives

Allytics Tech Perspectives

Allytics Tech Perspectives

StackState

StackState’s mission is to empower teams with full-stack observability to help them achieve goals faster, captivate customers, and make organizations more resilient. The company aims to provide an integrated view of an organization’s systems, applications, and infrastructure, enabling real-time guidance to optimize performance, quickly address issues, and ensure the reliability of business-critical services. StackState was founded on the principle of tracking all resource dependencies and relationships associated with IT issues to enable quick and easy remediation, a capability its founders initially built to solve a critical issue for a large bank.

A key goal for StackState is to redefine the limits of observability by transforming full-stack data into actionable insights. This involves helping SREs, platform leads, and software development engineers to easily navigate, understand, and control complex modern IT systems. StackState focuses on its unique 4T Data Model—merging Topology, Telemetry, Tracing, and Time—to deliver insight into the entire IT landscape by capturing every millisecond of change. In June 2024, SUSE acquired StackState with the intention of integrating its technology into Rancher Prime and eventually open-sourcing StackState to foster wider adoption.

StackState is recognized for its topology-powered observability, which is considered a key differentiator. Customers and industry observers often praise its ability to provide insight into complex and dynamic IT environments. The platform is noted for helping IT teams reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and decrease outages by correlating topology, telemetry, traces, and changes to provide context for IT service management processes. StackState has been described with terms like “Observability Swiss Knife” and “Great Insight Into Complex Landscapes”. The company is also seen as committed and tenacious in helping customers achieve their observability goals.

Offerings, Capabilities, and Integrations

StackState provides a full-stack, topology-powered observability platform designed to give organizations a comprehensive and actionable view of their entire IT environment. Its core capability lies in combining topology with telemetry data (metrics, logs, events, and traces) over time, often referred to as its 4T Data Model. This allows StackState to map all components and their dependencies, providing real-time insights into the health and performance of complex systems, including applications, infrastructure, and business processes. StackState’s platform is designed to break down data silos by integrating with a wide array of existing monitoring tools, cloud providers, and CI/CD systems. This tech-agnostic approach allows businesses to leverage their current investments while gaining enhanced visibility.

The platform’s ability to correlate events and changes across the stack helps IT teams quickly identify root causes of issues, reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR), and proactively prevent outages. This focus on guided troubleshooting and actionable insights enhances cross-team collaboration and operational efficiency. StackState’s competitive edge is derived from its unique combination of time-traveling topology, automated discovery, and the ability to visualize the impact of changes, which helps in managing the complexity of modern cloud-native and hybrid environments. This positions StackState as a solution for enterprises looking to improve service reliability and accelerate innovation.

In June 2024, SUSE acquired StackState with the intention of integrating its observability platform into Rancher Prime, SUSE’s enterprise container management service, and eventually open-sourcing StackState’s technology. This acquisition is expected to enhance SUSE’s cloud-native observability capabilities.

Products and Services

StackState’s primary offering is its topology-powered observability platform. This platform serves as its flagship product and encompasses several key features and services:

  • Full-Stack Monitoring and Observability: Provides an end-to-end view of an organization’s entire IT stack, including applications, services, and infrastructure components, along with their real-time states and dependencies.
  • Topology Visualization: Offers dynamic, real-time graphical overviews of the IT landscape, organized in layers and business domains, showing how different components rely on each other. This includes dependency maps.
  • 4T Data Model (Topology, Telemetry, Tracing, Time): Combines these four dimensions of data to provide a comprehensive understanding of system behavior and to pinpoint root causes of issues. This includes data correlation capabilities.
  • Guided Troubleshooting: Offers a systematic approach to identifying and resolving issues efficiently, enhancing problem-solving capabilities and streamlining processes. This includes remediation guides.
  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM): Enables users to detect anomalies, pinpoint root causes, and optimize application performance across the full stack.
  • Kubernetes Troubleshooting: Provides specific solutions for monitoring and troubleshooting Kubernetes environments.
  • Integrations (StackPacks): Offers numerous out-of-the-box integrations with various data sources, monitoring tools, cloud platforms (like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform), and other IT systems (like Splunk, ServiceNow, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenTelemetry). StackState also provides an agent for data collection where needed.
  • Dynamic Dashboards: Allows users to create and customize dashboards to visualize key metrics and system health.
  • Out-of-the-Box Monitors: Provides pre-configured monitors to quickly start observing common components and services.
  • Notification and Alerts: Delivers alerts on issues and anomalies.
  • Time-Traveling Topology: Allows users to go back in time to see the state of their stack at a specific moment, aiding in understanding the timeline of an incident.
  • Autonomous Anomaly Detection: Uses machine learning to identify abnormal behavior within the IT environment.

As part of SUSE, StackState’s platform is expected to be integrated into Rancher Prime, enhancing its cloud-native observability capabilities. SUSE has also announced its intention to open-source StackState’s technology in the future.

Target Customers

StackState targets medium and large enterprise IT organizations, particularly those with complex, dynamic, and hybrid IT environments. Its solutions are designed for companies that operate mission-critical applications and services where reliability and uptime are paramount. This includes sectors such as financial services (banks, insurers), telecommunications, and managed service providers.

These target customers benefit from StackState’s products and services in several ways:

  • Reduced Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR): By quickly identifying the root cause of incidents through topology-powered observability and guided troubleshooting.
  • Fewer Outages and Improved Reliability: Proactive issue detection and prevention help maintain service availability and performance.
  • Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Automation of discovery, dependency mapping, and streamlined troubleshooting processes reduce manual effort and operational costs.
  • Improved Cross-Team Collaboration: A unified view of the IT stack fosters better communication and collaboration between DevOps, SRE, and operations teams.
  • Better Visibility in Complex Environments: StackState helps organizations understand and manage the intricacies of cloud-native architectures, microservices, and hybrid cloud deployments.
  • Maximized ROI on Existing Tools: Through integration capabilities, StackState allows companies to leverage data from their current monitoring and IT management solutions.
  • Faster Innovation: By ensuring stable and reliable IT operations, teams can focus more on development and innovation.

Customers often include IT operations teams, DevOps teams, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), and business IT service managers who need a comprehensive overview of their IT stack to ensure business continuity and performance.

Cloud Integrations and Marketplaces

StackState offers several cloud integrations and is available on major cloud marketplaces, enabling customers to leverage its observability platform within their existing cloud environments.

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS): StackState provides seamless support for cloud-native architectures on AWS. It can ingest data from AWS, discover and map dependencies between all AWS resources (like Lambda functions, API gateways, and VPC groups) and other technologies. StackState is available on the AWS Marketplace. This allows customers to procure and deploy StackState directly through their AWS accounts. StackState’s platform helps visualize AWS environments in real-time, correlate topology with telemetry and trace data, and analyze the impact of changes made through AWS CloudFormation or other means.
  • Microsoft Azure: StackState integrates with Microsoft Azure, providing full-stack visibility across cloud and on-premise environments. This includes monitoring Azure components and understanding relationships between on-premise and Azure resources. While a direct Azure Marketplace offering by StackState itself is not explicitly detailed in the search results, StackState’s capabilities include integrating with Azure. One search result mentions StackState in the context of the Azure Marketplace through a partner, Xebia Middle East.
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP): StackState has partnered with Google Cloud and its full-stack observability solution is available on the Google Cloud Marketplace. This allows Google Cloud customers to access StackState’s platform to enhance observability within their Google Cloud ecosystem, particularly for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environments. The integration leverages eBPF technology and OpenTelemetry.

StackState’s general approach is to integrate with various cloud platforms and monitoring tools to provide a unified view of an IT landscape. It is designed to automatically discover and map dependencies across different components, including applications, services, infrastructure, and cloud resources. In June 2024, SUSE announced its acquisition of StackState, with plans to embed its observability capabilities into SUSE’s Rancher platform and to eventually open-source StackState. This acquisition aims to accelerate cloud-native observability for enterprises.

Key People

  • CEO: Andreas Prins.
  • Product Owner & Co-Founder: Mark Bakker.
  • Co-Founder & CTO: Lodewijk Bogaards.
  • Head of Sales: Jeroen Storm.
  • Head of Marketing: Genevieve Cross.
  • Head of Customer Success: Kees van Bekkum.

Key Facts

  • Headquarters Location: Hilversum, The Netherlands.
  • Number of Employees: 51-200.
  • Annual Revenue: $15M.
  • Parent Company: SUSE.
  • Subsidiary Companies: None.
  • Publicly Listed: No (StackState is private and was acquired by SUSE, which is also privately held after being taken private).

Analyst Recognition

StackState has been recognized by Gartner, Forrester, and IDC in the AIOps and Observability market categories. StackState is positioned as a vendor providing solutions that enhance IT operations through artificial intelligence and comprehensive system visibility.

  • Gartner: StackState was named as a key vendor in the Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) Platforms category in Gartner’s “Hype Cycle for ICT in India, 2018”. StackState was also named a Key Vendor in Gartner’s 2019 Market Guide for AIOps Platforms. In this guide, Gartner placed StackState in the domain-agnostic quadrant of AIOps, highlighting StackState’s design as an AIOps platform applicable to many use cases. Additionally, StackState was recognized as a Representative Vendor in the domain-agnostic AIOps platforms market in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms. Gartner also named StackState a Cool Vendor in its Performance Analysis report, noting StackState’s topology views that provide a graphical display of relationships across IT and business elements.
  • Forrester: Forrester has acknowledged StackState as an AIOps vendor that assists I&O (Infrastructure and Operations) leaders in making data-driven decisions. In “The Forrester Tech Tide: Modern Technology Operations, Q4 2019,” Forrester placed the AIOps category and StackState as a vendor into the invest quadrant. Forrester defines tools in the AIOps category, like StackState, as those using AI/ML algorithms to provide a unified view of service components by analyzing data from various monitoring tools.
  • IDC: IDC Research concluded that StackState improves service delivery outcomes through the use of advanced predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. An IDC research paper highlighted that StackState applies AI across four dimensions to drive these service delivery outcomes.
  • Everest Group: There is no readily available information indicating that StackState has been specifically recognized by Everest Group in its technology market analyses.
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