About Us

bitdrift was born out of years of frustration while building internet infrastructure at scale. Founded with years of collective experience (and tears!) at companies such as Lyft, Twitter, AWS, Square, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, including creating Envoy, we came to realize an ugly truth: the observability ecosystem as it exists today is broken.

As the industry has evolved, our frameworks and tools have improved by leaps and bounds, and today we have the best visibility we've ever had. But we're drowning in a sea of noise: 95% of the data collected to monitor the health of systems is never read. Not by an engineer, not by a machine, not by a data scientist, not by anyone! Yet the vendors and tools they provide are geared solely toward greater and greater ingestion, happy to charge us for the privilege of storing useless data. It's an egregiously offensive misuse of time, money, and carbon.

At the same time, mobile observability is decades behind what is available on server. Mobile engineers are lucky to have a static set of analytic events in production, and modifying them to debug ongoing issues is likely a multi-week or month process to deploy changes out to the majority of clients. Even when deployed, great care must be taken to not send too much data lest it overwhelm limited network and CPU bandwidth and balloon data warehouse costs.

And finally, on both mobile and server there's a huge gap in understanding and fixing the problems users of internet systems are actually having. A sampled error log is only so useful. What about all of the debug context that came before that log that might provide the clues needed to actually solve the problem? What about high volume telemetry that is simply infeasible to send at all times? What if it were possible to have unlimited telemetry, but only collect it in the cases in which it is highly likely to be utilized?

bitdrift aims to turn the vicious cycle of adding more telemetry so that there might be enough information to solve customer problems, only to have sticker shock at the resultant bill, on its head. We give engineers control over emitted observability data with a suite of real-time capabilities that prioritize customers' experience, engineers' productivity, and do it all at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions. And we do this holistically across the entire distributed system: from every server all the way to the mobile edge.