Israeli startup Lumigo is exiting stealth mode today backed by $8 million in seed funding for its intelligent serverless application monitoring and troubleshooting tool.

Grove Ventures and Pitango Venture Capital led the round, which will be used to further Lumigo’s research and development efforts ahead of its future product launch.

Serverless computing is a popular new execution model in which public cloud providers dynamically allocate resources whenever a piece of code is executed and only charge for the amount of resources used to run it. Adoption of serverless computing is said to be growing at about 300 percent per quarter, Lumigo says. That’s because it allows developers to focus only on writing their code, without worrying about the underlying information technology infrastructure.

That’s all well and good, but Lumigo argues that serverless computing’s advantages are constrained by a lack of ability for organizations to see the “big picture” within the cloud infrastructure they use. Because of this, they often struggle to identify why problems arise with their applications.

“Developers often feel that moving to serverless means giving up too much visibility and control, making it difficult to identify and respond to issues,” Lumigo officials said.

The problem with serverless is its “inherently highly distributed” nature, with a single request possibly triggering dozens of distributed services and functions that make it impossible to keep track of what’s happening, Lumigo said.

As a result, developers have very few options when it comes to investigating what went wrong and how to remedy it. The general procedure is to try to trace and understand what happened when a specific request failed by manually piecing together logs according to the time they were issued.

But this is a heuristic approach that “does not work when you have more than a couple of requests per second due to the volume involved,” Lumigo cofounders Erez Berkner and Aviad Mor (pictured) told SiliconANGLE.

The other option developers can try is to write code for each component that will add a unique ID for every request in the system, and transfer that ID throughout the different services that are used. “That takes a lot of cross-department work and does not work for many of the asynchronous serverless components out there like S3 or DynamoDB,” they said.

The startup’s platform resolves this by effectively giving developers “eyes and ears” inside their serverless applications. Its software creates a live visual map of the cloud infrastructure being used, following each request from the entry point through the various functions and services it enables. With this, developers can easily log events and identify what went wrong with their applications should any problems crop up.

Lumigo’s software is still under development ahead of its official launch, but users can sign up for a free trial in order to test the platform on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud infrastructure.

Photo: Lumigo