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Metrist Launches with Observability Release and $5.5M in Seed Funding

Metrist, an observability startup, launched today by two PagerDuty alumni.

Metrist gives organizations real-time visibility into cloud dependencies so that they can address outages effectively and hold vendors accountable.

The company also announces the General Availability of its product and $5.5m in seed funding led by Heavybit.

Metrist created a platform to understand the health of every third-party dependency a customer relies on. Out-of-the-box functional tests run continuously to create visibility into more than 60 popular IaaS, API, and SaaS products. Users can run Metrist software securely on their own for functional tests against any service, while an eBPF agent and language plugins enable observation of how applications interact with cloud dependencies in real time. The result is a platform that alerts users immediately when issues start, offering clear and trusted details on what the problem is, so that impact can be mitigated, incidents resolved quickly, and vendors held accountable to SLAs.

Two veterans of Observability and Incident Management co-founded Metrist after working together as early employees of PagerDuty. Ryan Duffield, CTO, and Jeff Martens, CEO, built Metrist because they experienced first-hand the problems caused by cloud dependencies, and heard time and time again that legacy observability tools didn’t solve the problem. In addition to PagerDuty, Duffield and Martens worked in product development at New Relic, Server Density, and Netdata between them.

"Third parties are a first-class concern, and it's time for observability to treat them that way,” said Jeff Martens, CEO & Co-Founder of Metrist. “We shouldn't have to wait for status pages to update with vague messages, if they are updated at all, and we certainly shouldn't have to rely on Twitter for clues into the health of the critical services that run our businesses. At Metrist, we believe every developer deserves an easy way to know the status of any third-party service, with timely notifications and clear metrics that define the health of their cloud dependencies."

Metrist is also sharing details of $5.5m in seed funding. Heavybit, the leader in developer tool funding, led the company’s financing, with participation from Morado Ventures and other early-stage funds. Joining the round were notable angel investors in the space, including Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty, as well as Steve Klein and Scott Klein, co-founders of StatusPage.io.

"Modern applications depend on an ever-increasing number of cloud products managed by external vendors, but the overall approach to observability hasn’t changed. You wouldn't dream of operating your internal services blindly and you need to manage your cloud dependencies with the same care,” said Joseph Ruscio, General Partner at Heavybit, on why they invested.

Ash Patel, Managing Director at Morado Venture Partners, had this to say: “Successfully managing a modern technology application stack is a data-driven business, and Metrist is positioned to own some of the most interesting data on what makes our digital world run. Ryan and Jeff's backgrounds make them ideally suited to make cloud dependency management a reality.”

Metrist is generally available today and offers a free plan for developers and paid plans.

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

Metrist Launches with Observability Release and $5.5M in Seed Funding

Metrist, an observability startup, launched today by two PagerDuty alumni.

Metrist gives organizations real-time visibility into cloud dependencies so that they can address outages effectively and hold vendors accountable.

The company also announces the General Availability of its product and $5.5m in seed funding led by Heavybit.

Metrist created a platform to understand the health of every third-party dependency a customer relies on. Out-of-the-box functional tests run continuously to create visibility into more than 60 popular IaaS, API, and SaaS products. Users can run Metrist software securely on their own for functional tests against any service, while an eBPF agent and language plugins enable observation of how applications interact with cloud dependencies in real time. The result is a platform that alerts users immediately when issues start, offering clear and trusted details on what the problem is, so that impact can be mitigated, incidents resolved quickly, and vendors held accountable to SLAs.

Two veterans of Observability and Incident Management co-founded Metrist after working together as early employees of PagerDuty. Ryan Duffield, CTO, and Jeff Martens, CEO, built Metrist because they experienced first-hand the problems caused by cloud dependencies, and heard time and time again that legacy observability tools didn’t solve the problem. In addition to PagerDuty, Duffield and Martens worked in product development at New Relic, Server Density, and Netdata between them.

"Third parties are a first-class concern, and it's time for observability to treat them that way,” said Jeff Martens, CEO & Co-Founder of Metrist. “We shouldn't have to wait for status pages to update with vague messages, if they are updated at all, and we certainly shouldn't have to rely on Twitter for clues into the health of the critical services that run our businesses. At Metrist, we believe every developer deserves an easy way to know the status of any third-party service, with timely notifications and clear metrics that define the health of their cloud dependencies."

Metrist is also sharing details of $5.5m in seed funding. Heavybit, the leader in developer tool funding, led the company’s financing, with participation from Morado Ventures and other early-stage funds. Joining the round were notable angel investors in the space, including Alex Solomon, co-founder of PagerDuty, as well as Steve Klein and Scott Klein, co-founders of StatusPage.io.

"Modern applications depend on an ever-increasing number of cloud products managed by external vendors, but the overall approach to observability hasn’t changed. You wouldn't dream of operating your internal services blindly and you need to manage your cloud dependencies with the same care,” said Joseph Ruscio, General Partner at Heavybit, on why they invested.

Ash Patel, Managing Director at Morado Venture Partners, had this to say: “Successfully managing a modern technology application stack is a data-driven business, and Metrist is positioned to own some of the most interesting data on what makes our digital world run. Ryan and Jeff's backgrounds make them ideally suited to make cloud dependency management a reality.”

Metrist is generally available today and offers a free plan for developers and paid plans.

The Latest

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...