How Chronosphere is Making the Observability Platform Built for Control

An itch for new challenges has propelled Martin Mao through multiple chapters of his career, ultimately prompting him to start Chronosphere in 2019 with Rob Skillington , a fellow Australian and a colleague from Microsoft, and then again at Uber.?

During their time working together at Uber, the volume of data the company was processing was growing ten-fold every year, a breakneck pace that often overwhelmed its technology infrastructure. Mao, Skillington, and team were tasked with fixing the problem.?

After creating a temporary solution, they realized Uber needed an entirely new tool that could serve a fast-growing, cloud-native computing company. He opted to use open-source software in order to attract engineers from other big tech companies to his team.?

Launched in 2017, the new observability platform allowed Uber to operate without any outages, including during high-volume events. It has also given the company’s technical leaders a real-time view of business metrics like number of rides given and the amount of payments processed.

But for Mao, solving this kind of big problem inevitably created a new one: what to do next??

In December of that year, he had an epiphany. At an industry conference in Seattle, major cloud hyperscalers decided to throw their weight behind a new cloud-based technology originally designed by Google called Kubernetes. The new reality was that every enterprise was going to choose between a hybrid or multicloud strategy and it was only possible if they adopted Kubernetes. “This meant that most technology architectures were eventually going to look like Uber’s,” Mao recalls. “And that meant every company, not just a few big tech companies and the Walmarts of the world, would have the exact same problem we had solved at Uber.”?

Mao and Skillington realized that if ever there were a time to start a company, this was it. “We knew there was this big opportunity in the market to build the product we wished we could have bought while at Uber,” Mao says. “I didn’t think in my lifetime I would have another opportunity like this.”?

Today, Chronosphere’s “observability” products help keep digital businesses up and running by quickly focusing on the data and insights that matter. Customers include Snap, Zillow, and DoorDash, and Mao estimates that the company’s platform reduces the volume of a company’s observability data — and the cost of maintaining that data — by up to 60 percent (representing up to $15 million in annual savings).?

Yet as Chronosphere heads into its sixth year, Mao’s unquenchable thirst for new challenges has yet to make him restless. “Both Rob and I feel like this is our one time,” he says. “We’re in it to make it count.”

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