Cardinal is building an ecosystem around telemetry data.  We want you to own your data, and give you the freedom to choose the components from various open source and commercial vendors to build the observability toolkit you need.  We do not want vendor lock-in to hold you or your data captive.

Imagine a world where your telemetry data is stored for basically free.  It’s the tools on top that compete for your dollars and attention, rather than vendors who want to charge per record, byte, or index.

Let’s build this together.

Build a Cabin on your Data Lake

Many of our customers already have a heavy arsenal of observability tools.  While we absolutely want to make more tools that you can use, we don’t want to make it necessary to duplicate the data to use a wide variety of tools from multiple vendors.

Each of the tools you use today likely serves a purpose, oftentimes a specific niche purpose that only that tool does well.  However, you’re also shipping a copy of your data to that vendor for any SaaS offering, or storing duplicate copies in your environment if hosted on-prem.

Our pitch here is simple: Store things in commodity object storage where all our tools can query.  This isn’t another database, it’s just S3 or another object store.  It’s cheap.  It’s reliable.  It’s fast, with a little help (that Cardinal brings!).

With a few specialized indexes on top of Blob Storage that tell us where to look + a Streaming Query Engine, queries can be blazing fast using S3 as the only backing storage.  We know this to be the case as we can query high cardinality data going back months in what our customers call a pretty snappy UI.  We want to share this data lake technology with the world.

Vendor Tools, not Storage

Now that we’ve made telemetry storage and retrieval cheap as dirt, let’s build a rich ecosystem of open source and proprietary tools on top of that data lake.  We need a way to move data around, not just store it.  We chose the Open Telemetry Collector for this.  Open Telemetry isn’t just the new hot topic in the observability world, it is radically changing how we handle our data and is achieving our goal of vendor neutrality.

Cardinal has built three main components which, working together, can help build a pile of queryable data and save you money while doing it.  Each of these is an Open Telemetry Collector component.

• S3 Parquet Exporter, which writes Open Telemetry into a flat table format that can be queried by any number of tools, including BigData tools (for example, Athena, BigQuery) you might already use.

• Cost Reduction Processor, which will allow filtering and rate limiting logs sent to an upstream provider, and aggregate metrics before sending them upstream.

• Receivers and Exporters for proprietary vendor formats.  We want to make it easy to move to Open Telemetry and the data lake model, so we made tools to do that.

Cardinal Tools

Cardinal has already built several cabins on that lake, currently offered through our SaaS model.  In the future we will have an on-prem offering.

• Cost Reduction: Intelligently rate limit logs and aggregate metrics before sending to your current vendor.  You keep the ability to have all the raw, unmodified data stored in our cloud, and eventually in your own cloud.  The benefit is, even without using other Cardinal tools or sending us any of your telemetry data, you reduce the cost of your current provider immediately and safely.

• Advanced Troubleshooting with Cohort Analysis: Quickly find hidden patterns in high cardinality metrics, and automatically find related metrics to help remediate technical and business effects.  Start with an error metric and end up with a root cause as well as business impact.

• Business Flows: Your business isn’t an API call.  Look at the whole picture using Business Flows, which will group and identify the things your services do.  Find login, shopping cart, checkout, and all those other things people do when using your services.  Layer on top errors between these services, and get to solving the business impact.

• Explorers, and other common tools:  Needless to mention, we also have the common tools like a logs explorer, metrics explorer, dashboards.

The cost reduction is open to anyone just by signing up for a free tier account.  Other features require us to receive some or all of your telemetry data to enable those features, which is a paid service.  You are likely to find our pricing budget-friendly.

About Cardinal

We're a team of former Netflix engineers who've spent the last decade building super-fast, dependable systems capable of handling petabytes of data. Cardinal represents the next step in our journey. We're combining tried-and-true Observability/SRE practices with cutting-edge innovations focused on cost-effectiveness and problem-solving efficiency, creating products that stand out in a crowded market.