Our Story: What Makes Us Different
The big idea behind StackState came during a high-stakes consulting project for one of Europe's largest banks. The dynamic duo of Mark Bakker and Lodewijk Bogaards, who would later go on to co-found StackState, had been called in to help the bank deal with a crisis. A highly-visible, critical, customer-facing application was failing repeatedly and the IT teams could not diagnose the root cause of the problem, let alone fix it. It wasn't that there wasn't any data about the problem; there was plenty of data. However, the data was siloed, messy and lacked any unifying context. Integrating the various telemetry data silos was possible, although it was challenging and time-consuming to do so. Even then, the unifying context challenge still remained.
Our co-founders' epiphany was that topology - the web of quickly changing relationships between the building blocks that made up the bank's IT environment - could be the answer. There was just one problem. Tracking a large, dynamic, complex topology over time at millisecond resolution wasn't possible with existing technology. So Lodewijk and Mark built StackGraph, the world's first, and only, high-performance versioned graph database.
Today, StackGraph is the beating heart of our topology-powered observability platform. We married StackGraph to a flexible data integration framework that we call the 4T® Data Model, which correlates topology changes with telemetry and trace data from any source, synchronized over time. This approach eliminated the data silo issues and integrated data from all sources into a unified topology. For the bank, finding root cause was now straightforward - and fast.
Observability is fundamentally a data challenge. Only StackState solves this challenge by making topology a first-class citizen with our unified data model. Better observability data means better business outcomes. Check out the full story of our origin in this blog post or watch the video, below. Better yet, contact us to learn more!
