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Observability is changing. Must change. Our goal is to help reinvent observability – make it smarter, more controlled – AI-first. The pains of current observability users and buyers are well documented: rising MTTR, soaring costs, vendor lock-in, siloed and inaccessible insights – with key business questions like service health, system capacity, and CoGs unanswered.
AI-First Observability
The current observability stack will not be able to keep up or succeed on its own. OpenTelemetry by itself is not THE answer nor are telemetry pipelines. They WILL be two fundamental foundations of the new observability stack.
AI – in a variety of forms – is the glue and accelerant to true change. The new stack will consist of AI agents orchestrated by an intelligent control plane enabling AI SRE assistants and a variety of specialized peer and enabling agentic technologies.
What OTel and telemetry pipelines do provide are a means for more intelligent observability to enable the next generation of AI agents and assistants to succeed. Combined with an AI-first approach, we believe they are an essential part of reconstructing observability, led by key post-modern technologies such as agentic architectures and distillation.
Distilling Observability
Telemetry data is noisy. Modern observability vendors have normalized this asymmetric architecture of fat data pipes and massive data lakes and then monetized it by by charging us for ingesting, analyzing, and retaining ALL that data.
But that’s no longer the case.
The new AI-powered stack can actually separate the signal from the noise – finding the needle in the haystack – by distilling telemetry down to its essential elements. Distillation – scientifically, the process of purifying a liquid to extract the essence from raw input – filters and clarifies telemetry through a series of agentic layers, concentrating the signal, not the noise.
Agentic AI layers automatically discover baselines, detect anomalies, uncover patterns, and boil up the most relevant signals. Feedback loops tune and reinforce learning. Utilizing a hierarchical, agentic architecture, ControlTheory distills log data from the bottom up — surfacing signal through layers of autonomous assistants.
AI for SREs
Our AI for SREs boils up telemetry into precise answers, offering root cause analysis with plain-English incident summaries, explanations, and a timeline of what changed — across infrastructure, app, and Kubernetes layers.
SREs get more effective and can validate and verify conclusions from the rich context and supporting evidence. Engineers and DevOps get AI-guided assistance and direction for incident triage and classification. Security analysts see threat patterns early.
“In control theory, the observability and controllability of a linear system are mathematical duals.”
Professor Rudolf E. Kálmán
Father of Modern Control Theory
The Observability Stack is Changing – for the Better
AI for SREs and AI SRE agents are changing the operational model for observability, augmenting and reinventing roles, addressing long-standing issues such as declining MTTR statistics and SRE efficiency. OpenTelemetry is blowing up the observability foundation from the bottom up, from the edge back to the data lake. AI-driven telemetry pipelines are distributing intelligence to the edge, creating smart data highways versus simple cost control mechanisms.
Observability is evolving to meet the next decade of challenges. AI is powering a redistribution of responsibilities and tasks through verticalized, deep domain-focused solutions. These solutions do not accept the status quo of modern observability but are instead reinventing it for the better.
Our Team
We are a team of observability veterans with a track record of successful startups—including StackEngine (acquired by Oracle Cloud) and CopperEgg (acquired by Idera). As founders, we have built and introduced innovative and disruptive technologies at Hyper9, nLayers, Airbrake, Turbonomic, SMARTS, and Packeteer, plus IPOs and acquisitions by Oracle, Logic Monitor, EMC, VMware, and SolarWinds
ControlTheory AI-First observability distills telemetry down to the essential answers SREs require, concentrating the signal, not the noise. Backed by $5 million in seed funding from Silverton Partners, ControlTheory enables organizations to move observability into the AI era by applying agentic intelligence across the full observability supply chain.
