Honey, I shrunk the telemetry
We are excited to announce the release of bitdrift’s first product, Capture, as well as our $15M series A financing from an amazing group of investors led by Amplify Partners! Focused on mobile observability, we believe that Capture will revolutionize how mobile engineers debug their applications.
Today we are incredibly excited to announce the release of bitdrift’s first product,
Capture, as well as our $15M series A financing from an amazing group of
investors led by Amplify
Partners! Focused on mobile observability, we believe that
Capture will revolutionize how mobile engineers debug their applications. To be bold: Capture
provides mobile developers the richest and most dynamic observability on the planet without breaking
the bank.
Before diving more into Capture, we want to step back and talk a bit about why we founded bitdrift
in the first place.
bitdrift was born out of years of frustration while building internet infrastructure at scale. With
collective experience (and tears!) at companies such as Twitter, AWS, Square, Google, Microsoft,
Netflix, and Salesforce, including creating Envoy during our shared
tenure at Lyft, we came to realize an ugly truth: the observability ecosystem as it exists today is
misaligned between vendor and consumer: vendors charge by volume with little thought given to the
usefulness of stored data; consumers are frustrated both by their bills and their ability to solve
real customer problems with that stored data. What if it were possible to change the observability
narrative by using real time dynamic control to emit only the telemetry that would likely be used to
solve customer problems? This is exactly what we set out to do several years ago at Lyft.
The backbone of our local storage solution is what we call the “ring buffer.” The ring buffer is a
highly performance tuned subsystem that has been designed to use a bounded and real time
configurable amount of RAM and disk. Data is first flushed to RAM and then cascaded to disk in the
background. The ring buffer abstraction allows for cheap local storage of telemetry, and is the
basis on which the bitdrift family of products is built.
Capture also includes a highly efficient and privacy conscious implementation of session
replay, capturing both 2D and 3D representations of mobile screen
state. Unlike competing solutions, the screen capture storage is so small that it can be
continuously captured, leading to a vastly improved mobile debugging experience.
We have spent a large portion of our careers being shackled and frustrated by lengthy mobile release
cycles leading to multi-week and multi-month delays fixing customer issues. Our goal with Capture is
for mobile developers to collect as much telemetry as desired in their apps, because it’s free.
Telemetry will only be emitted when called for by dynamic real time control. We believe this
capability is going to unlock rapid resolution of customer issues at an unheard of low price point.
Today we are thrilled to open the waitlist for Capture. Sign up to
give the free tier a try; we will be onboarding people rapidly while
we monitor and ensure a great experience for all. Please join us in
Slack as well to ask questions and
give feedback!
Mobile observability today is wasteful, disorganized, and way behind server
As the industry has evolved, our server 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? We have been trained to capture data, and store and analyze it centrally. What if it were possible to flip this around such that in the majority of cases we capture, store, and perform the first phase of analysis remotely, and only commit to central storage in the cases in which the data is highly likely to be utilized? Can we provide the illusion of unlimited, free telemetry?We’ve built a way to dynamically control telemetry in real time
Starting with mobile and Capture, we are changing the observability game by enabling dynamic real time control of emitted session telemetry on both iOS and Android. Devices can be targeted instantaneously, from all clients, to specific cohorts (all Android users, all iOS users on a particular OS version, etc.), all the way down to individual devices. Sophisticated local storage coupled with real time configuration via the bitdrift control plane allows for distributed search over observability data, and for telemetry to be flushed only when asked for and when it is highly likely to be useful in solving a customer problem. Once flushed, session data can be viewed in a purpose built timeline viewer, facilitating rapid debugging of customer problems.Battle tested and ready to solve real world problems
Possibly most importantly, today’s SDK release for iOS and Android is not beta quality. It is already deployed on millions of devices within the Lyft app, and has been battle tested at scale. Capture is ready to solve real-world challenges for organizations around the world today.