Observability of software systems is required for any nontrivial application. But, unfortunately, it’s not cheap — sometimes accounting for 10–15% of total infrastructure spend. Over the past decade, many companies have poured massive resources into logs, traces, and metrics, only to see monthly bills balloon and, too frequently, outpace the value delivered.
Yet, as we’ve watched the observability market expand at breakneck speed, few solutions have emerged to address the structural problems behind observability’s spiraling cost.
That’s why we are excited to announce our investment in Grepr, an observability cost-optimization platform that helps companies slash their spend without compromising visibility. Grepr’s combination of real-time data optimization and practical developer tooling is precisely what we believe the market needs.
At scale, one of the biggest cost drivers in observability is redundant data and inefficient routing to multiple destinations. Grepr uses adaptive intelligence to analyze usage patterns and route only the data that truly matters. This cuts down on needless replication while maintaining fidelity by backfilling relevant data from object storage as needed.
Grepr also addresses the pitfalls of traditional sampling, which often discards critical insights in order to cap usage. Grepr’s approach is more nuanced, inspecting data in real time and sampling selectively based on application importance, user behavior, and service-level indicators. This ensures that key signals aren’t lost in the noise.
We’ve known Jad Naous, Grepr’s founder, for a long time, both as a partner at a16z and as a builder at Imply and AppDynamics. His grasp of complex enterprise systems is second to none, and he’s seen firsthand how large-scale observability can blow up budgets. So it’s no surprise that early pilot customers are already reporting significantly lower bills with minimal tweaks to their existing stacks — precisely because Grepr was designed from the start with these pain points in mind.
We are thrilled to be investing in Grepr’s round and working closely with Jad again. If you’ve felt the pain of ballooning observability costs — or held off on new telemetry because of cost concerns — Grepr is worth a hard look. It’s the next evolution in how we manage, monitor, and ultimately pay for the systems that keep our businesses running.
