Introducing OllyGarden

In the rush for visibility, many organizations find themselves lost in an overgrown jungle of data. Teams generate a constant stream of telemetry, hoping it will sprout into useful insights. Instead, they often end up with "bad telemetry"—data that is noisy, irrelevant, or incomplete, driving up costs and obscuring the very answers they seek.

Today, we're coming out of stealth to introduce OllyGarden, a new company dedicated to tending this garden of observability. Backed by a pre-seed round led by DIG Ventures, with investments from observability leaders like Datadog Ventures, Grafana Labs, and Dash0, as well as special angels with deep knowledge in our space, like Batuhan Uslu, Ben Sigelman, Chris Aniszczyk, and Ian Livingstone, we're ready to get to work.

Our mission is simple: to improve the efficiency of telemetry pipelines. We believe the first and most crucial step is to help companies understand and optimize the telemetry they are already generating.

The Weeds We’re Tackling: Real-World Telemetry Pains

The problem of bad telemetry isn't theoretical; it's a daily struggle for engineering teams everywhere. During our research, we heard the same stories again and again. These might sound familiar to you:

• Runaway Costs: An engineer at a company based in Berlin mentioned that they had a single high-cardinality metric generating over $20,000 worth of telemetry per month without a clear value. After reducing the cardinality, the cost was reduced to $2,000. How many such metrics are hiding in your pipelines, undetected?

• Broken Insights & Poor User Experience: What happens when telemetry fails? An engineer working at a company in Australia mentioned that their support team uses distributed tracing to debug user-reported problems, but incomplete traces limit their ability to help their users, directly impacting customer satisfaction.

• The "Instrument Everything" Trap: Auto-instrumentation tools are powerful, but if left unconfigured they can gather far more information than necessary. This can generate extremely high volumes of data, overloading systems before you even get a chance to analyze the data.

• Vast, Unchecked Data Volumes: Another company shared that they generate about 3 Petabytes of uncompressed telemetry per month, acknowledging that among that trove of data, "a lot of it is bad telemetry". With industry experts estimating that up to 90% of telemetry data goes unused, imagine how many CPU cycles, collector instances, and how much egress traffic could be spared if that bad telemetry wasn't generated in the first place.

Our First Step: OllyGarden Insights & the Instrumentation Score

You can't improve what you can't measure. For too long, evaluating telemetry quality has been a subjective exercise based on gut feelings and tribal knowledge. We're tackling this problem by giving observability engineers superpowers, allowing them to see exactly how good the telemetry is inside their pipelines.

Our first product, OllyGarden Insights, analyzes your telemetry streams to give you deep insights into your data quality. It assesses your instrumentation against best practices, identifies services that are over- or under-instrumented, and helps you make informed, data-driven decisions about what to change.

To provide a common vocabulary for this, we launched the Instrumentation Score, a standardized value to objectively assess OpenTelemetry instrumentation. We believe such a fundamental metric for telemetry health shouldn't be proprietary. That’s why we initiated the Instrumentation Score as an open-source effort, with an open governance model and support from partners like Dash0, Datadog, Grafana Labs, Honeycomb, New Relic, and Splunk. This is our first major contribution back to the community we care so much about, and a testament to how we plan to operate.

Why OllyGarden? Our Roots in OpenTelemetry

We know the challenges of telemetry because we've been helping build the solutions for years. OllyGarden was founded by OpenTelemetry veteran Juraci Paixão Kröhling and SRE expert Yuri Oliveira Sá. As a member of the OpenTelemetry Governance Committee, creator of the OpenTelemetry Operator and OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (ocb), and one of the project's top contributors, Juraci has been on the front lines of the observability revolution.

This deep experience shapes our core philosophy:

• A Vendor-Neutral Approach: Our business is to make your telemetry more efficient. We are a neutral partner you can trust, acting as a complement to observability backends by helping their customers send them higher-quality data. We succeed when you gain clarity, regardless of where your data is stored.

• The Start of Our Journey: OllyGarden Insights is our first major step. We are focused on delivering immediate value by helping you understand and improve the telemetry you already have. We are just at the beginning of our journey and are incredibly excited about the future, but our commitment today is clear: to empower engineers with the backend-neutral tools they need to cultivate clarity from their data.

Start Cultivating Better Telemetry Today

It's time to move beyond the jungle of bad telemetry and start purposefully cultivating a garden of clear, actionable insights.

We are now engaging with early users. By joining us, you will not only see the power of purposeful instrumentation firsthand but also have the unique opportunity to help shape our product and secure special early-bird pricing. We'll analyze a sample of your telemetry and provide you with your Instrumentation Score and actionable insights for improvement.

Ready to see what's really growing in your telemetry pipelines? Contact us at contact@olly.garden or visit our website to learn more.