Application observability startup Groundcover Ltd. wants to muscle in on an industry dominated by the likes of Datadog Inc. and New Relic Inc. after getting $35 million in fresh funding.

Today’s Series B round was led by Zeev Ventures and saw participation from investors including Heavybit, Jibe Venture and Angular Ventures, bringing the company’s total amount raised to $60 million thus far.

Groundcover claims to have developed the first “Bring Your Own Cloud” observability platform, which has the advantage of letting customers host their observability data wherever they want, either on-premises or in the secure cloud environment of their choice. The company fully manages both the platform and the data within it, regardless of where it’s hosted.

The startup’s observability platform is designed to monitor the performance of applications, systems and their infrastructure by collecting data on error messages, performance metrics and user activity. By capturing and analyzing this data in real time, it can help teams to spot unusual behavior that could lead to problems, identify the cause of that behavior, and fix it before it leads to major problems and downtime. The result is improved user experiences and better overall stability for applications and systems.

Groundcover’s novel approach gives customers more flexibility, allowing them to choose where they store and maintain their observability data and meet their specific security and privacy requirements. It offers unlimited data capacity and simple, predictable pricing, utilizing extended Berkeley Packet Filter or eBPF technology to gather information such as logs, traces and metrics directly from the Linux kernel. In doing this, it provides “super-granular visibility” into the entire application environment, the startup says.

EBPF is an emerging observability tool that stands out from legacy approaches thanks to its ability to execute programs that can exfiltrate monitoring data within the Linux kernel without altering its source code in any way. It helps to ensure observability operations remain isolated and inobtrusive, while simplifying the export of data to third-party platforms. It results in increased visibility as well as more context and greater accuracy regarding infrastructure and network events.

Groundcover co-founder and Chief Executive Shahar Azulay (pictured, left), isn’t the slightest bit modest about his platform’s capabilities. He insisted that it provides “much better coverage and value” than legacy application monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus and others.

“We are the only solution built with eBPF at the forefront from day one, and we are now pioneering the ‘bring your own cloud’ approach to observability that enables organizations to keep their data on-premises while maintaining all of the benefits of the SaaS experience,” he said.

Though there’s no doubt that its rivals will contest such claims, Groundcover seems to have convinced a lot of companies that it’s not wrong. It says its platform is now being used by “hundreds of enterprises,” including several of the Fortune 100, enabling it to grow its annual recurring revenue by more than 500% in the last year.

Moreover, it stressed that “dozens” of its customers migrated to its platform from Datadog, which is widely regarded as the observability industry’s most popular. Those customers were aided by the startup’s new artificial intelligence-powered migration tool, which enables the seamless transfer of observability data from any legacy platform to Groundcover’s.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said there’s an intense battle going on in the observability industry now, and it’s far from clear if the incumbent vendors will be able to retain their lead. “Groundcover’s funding suggests it’s onto something good, but it will have to spend this cash wisely if it’s to give the established players a real run for their money,” he added.

Nobl9 Inc. Chief Technology Officer Alex Nauda said his company was one of the first to take advantage of Groundcover’s new migration tool, and he insisted that he’s very happy he did.

“With Datadog, we were paying for both infrastructure and observability, effectively doubling costs,” he explained. “With Groundcover, we host it ourselves and define our own retention policies – no more expensive SaaS markups, unexpected overages, or forced data deletions due to cost limits.”

Zeev Ventures founder Oren Zev said he’s backing Groundcover because of its eBPF-driven platform and Bring Your Own Cloud approach, which creates new standards in terms of observability depth, cost-effectiveness and security.

“As the industry continues to shift to richer experiences, such as AI around observability data, Groundcover with its unique and modern architecture is positioned to outpace legacy solutions and dominate the space,” he said.

Image: Groundcover