Epsagon Inc., a two-year-old startup that provides visibility into workloads built on serverless platforms, today announced new extensions to its core that target software containers, the self-contained operating environments that are increasingly favored by developers.

The company, which raised $16 million in January on top of an earlier $4 million seed round, is expanding its core microservices observability platform with enhanced automation and correlation capabilities and adding cloud platform support for Microsoft Corp. Azure in addition to existing support for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s public cloud.

Epsagon’s platform collects data about applications using a lightweight agent software development kit that doesn’t require installing any software in a company’s cloud environment. With no query language or special configuration requirements, the company said, its observability software can provide automated instrumentation and tracing within five minutes of setup without training, manual coding, tagging or maintenance.

The company is targeting the inherent complexity of applications that use many microservices or containers. Although such applications are easier and more flexible to assemble, they’re more difficult to troubleshoot because of the large number of variables involved.

“As companies adopt microservices the applications may involve hundreds or thousands of services,” said Chief Executive Nitzan Shapira. “When something goes wrong, it takes hours or days to troubleshoot because of the need to observe metrics and logs. In some organizations, lack of traceability can cause any issue to become a crisis.”

Observability has become a hot category with the rise of ephemeral software that may be called upon by an application to operate for just a few seconds and then disappear. Numerous startups have emerged to make the process of tracing application logic in such an environment more coherent, with many having already been acquired by larger firms.

Epsagon automates the process of analyzing trends or spikes for more accurate troubleshooting across both serverless and container environments. It enables monitoring of three sources of data: service performance metrics, service metrics from a cloud infrastructure provider and custom business metrics.

Epsagon says its strength is in distributed tracing, which pinpoints failure points across distributed networks. “To do distributed tracing you need to know the ins and outs of each environment,” Shapira said.

Its software development kit supports the NodeJS, Python, Go, Java and .NET languages and integrates with AWS and Azure cloud management platforms, programming languages and application program interfaces.

The company offers a free version of its product that provides for up to 1,000 traces per month with alerts and unlimited users. A Pro version provides between one million and 10 million traces per month at prices ranging from $99 to $449. There’s also a custom-quoted enterprise version.

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