Service level observability startup Nobl9 Inc. announced today that it has raised $15.8 million in new funding for product development, increased customer service and further education of the community about the power of service-level objectives.

ServiceNow Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. led the Series C round, with existing investors Battery Ventures and CRV also participating. Including the new funding, the company has raised $44.3 million in funding, according to data from Crunchbase.

Founded in 2019, Nobl9 offers a software reliability platform designed to assist software developers, DevOps teams and reliability engineers in delivering reliable features through software-defined service-level objectives. SLOs are agreed-upon targets within service-level agreements that must be achieved for each service, activity, function and process.

The Nobl9 platform provides a common understanding of reliability by defining SLOs across an organization. The platform collects Service Level Indicator or SLI metrics from existing observability systems and tracks error budgets across platforms and applications.

The tracking feature in the company’s offering tracks allowable downtime to better manage incident response, while the platform provides optimization options, including a broad choice of observability open-source tools. The platform supports the creation of SLOs from observability data, the integration of SLOs in GitOps workflows using Terraform or YAML templates, and the ability to integrate multiple SLIs into a single SLO.

Nobl9 counts among its customers Flexera Software LLC, OutSystems – Software em Rede S.A., Procore Technologies Inc., Spectro Cloud Inc., Codefresh Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc.

The funding from ServiceNow and Cisco is said to highlight the work Nobl9 is undertaking to develop the market for SLOs. According to research, eight of 10 companies are increasing their use of SLOs not only in information technology operations but also increasingly among business teams such as executives, manufacturing, research and development, marketing and finance.

“Requirements for enterprises to create a scalable relationship between operations and software services while maintaining consistent customer experience and keeping costs at a reasonable level have continued to increase” Noah Yago, vice president of corporate development and investments at Cisco, said in a statement. “With growing expectations, enterprises are demanding innovative SLO solutions that will help them address these challenges and keep operations running smoothly.”

Image: Nobl9