By Kris Day
Startup funding: Indian startups continue to face the effects of the global economic downturn, with a 72% decline in funding during the first half of 2023 compared to a year ago. As VCs tighten their budgets, investments into Indian startups are at a four-year low in 2023.
Despite this challenging environment, startups in India have displayed resilience. However, with shrinking teams and budgets, they are under immense pressure to innovate and achieve growth to secure future funding. A report by PwC found that in the last few quarters, despite challenging market conditions, investors are doubling down on startups that demonstrated positive growth and innovation.
Startups must find a way to continue to grow and innovate amid tough market conditions without compromising on the quality of the services they provide.
Also read: Over 3,000 fintech startups registered with DPIIT in India: MoS Corporate Affairs
The DIY tooling trap
Code production, shipping, and tackling customer-facing issues are often everyone’s problems in a startup because the teams are smaller and resources are limited. In such situations, outages and other indicators of poor customer experiences can be commonplace, resulting in reputational damage, employee attrition and revenue loss. In fact, 98% of organisations report downtime costs over USD$100,000 per hour, while 81% put the cost at over USD$300,000 per hour.
In many startups, a lot of time is spent on monitoring, debugging and ensuring system health. With limited resources, some make the misstep of trying to develop their own monitoring solutions which ultimately take focus away from improving their core product offering. What startups in India need to do is spend less money on building DIY monitoring tools, and instead direct it towards R&D, hiring great engineering talent, and focusing on areas that drive real growth.
Building monitoring solutions to tackle existing systems from scratch is a long and arduous process, and if done incorrectly can result in blind spots. Startups need a smart investment strategy to optimise spend on tooling. This is where all-in-one observability platforms play an important role. The right observability platform can proactively collect, visualise, and apply intelligence to all of the telemetry data so startups don’t have to spend valuable time building bespoke solutions or firefighting issues, and can instead focus their time on creating great software and customer experiences.
Deployment velocity and complex architectures
Modern architectures are increasingly complex and software is being developed and deployed faster than ever by increasingly distributed teams. With the pressure on startups to continuously deliver high-quality outputs fast, it’s becoming exceptionally challenging to detect issues when they arise.
Monitoring and fixing issues in complex modern systems at scale cannot be done manually. Considering the vast amount of data and numerous apps employed by startups, it could take hours, even days to find and fix issues without the right observability platform, resulting in system outages that can directly impact revenue.
In an attempt to tackle the problem, startups deploy many tools, often open-sourced tooling, leaving all the data generated in siloes. They cannot gain full visibility into system health and have to toggle between the different tools to identify, isolate and fix issues when they arise. This reactionary approach is not only time-consuming but makes it almost impossible to accurately visualise and interpret the data.
Clear visibility, no more siloes
By employing an all-in-one observability platform, startups don’t have to worry about falling into the trap of siloes. They gain full visibility into their IT environment; enabling them to take a proactive approach to optimising the health of their systems by providing a real-time view of all telemetry data in one place. Furthermore, when such solutions are integrated with Generative AI-powered assistants, fixing a problem is just a text prompt away and provides the flexibility to ask simple questions about applications and infrastructure and get the answers needed.
These observability platforms provide startups with the same developer tools world-class engineering organisations use to observe, analyse, and improve the performance of their software. They enable engineers to create better customer experiences by helping them understand critical incidents so that they can take proactive measures to prevent them from happening again. And ultimately, observability provides businesses with actionable analytics and insights to create a data-driven culture across the organisation.
Startups must optimise their time and efforts towards scaling, increasing revenue and innovating. They often fall into the trap of building their own tools and as a result, lose track of the bigger picture. All-in-one observability solutions aren’t an unnecessary cost centre for startups but drivers of revenue, growth and innovation. It is the competitive differentiator that can set them apart from competitors in an increasingly challenging market, which is why the time to adopt observability is now.
Kris Day is the Senior VP & General Manager, APJ at New Relic. Views expressed are the author’s own.