“Search plays a fundamental role in just about every modern application, from Amazon and Netflix, to Slack and Salesforce. On top of that, every application generates swathes of log data, which includes timestamped information about events from inside the software — this might be details on what resources were accessed, the runtime characteristics of an application, and anything relevant to the operation of that system.

Being able to search and make sense of all these computer-generated logs is important because it helps companies troubleshoot errors and bugs, solve bottlenecks and latency issues, comply with regulations or internal security policies, and better understand what’s going on under the hood. It all constitutes part of what is known as “observability” — that is, the ability to measure the internal state of a software system by analyzing the raw outputs.

ADVERTISEMENT

Typically, companies pool all their log data in a centralized database system such as ClickHouse. But administering and managing all this comes with many challenges, while the costs associated with storing log data can lead companies to ditch portions of it. This is a problem that Quickwit is setting out to solve, with an open source, cloud-native search and analytics engine built for large datasets.

Founded in 2020, Quickwit touts its ability to run sub-second queries on terabytes of data on object storage services such as Amazon S3 — and it promises to do so at up to “ten times cheaper” than Elasticsearch. But Quickwit isn’t necessarily designed as a direct replacement for every scenario covered by search incumbents such as Elasticsearch — it has more limited, targeted use-cases in mind.

To build on the momentum it has built since its first release last July, the company today announced a $2.6 million seed round of funding co-led by FirstMark and firstminute, with participation from a slew of notable angel backers including MongoDB cofounder Eliot Horowitz; Dataiku CEO and CTO Florian Douetteau and Clément Stenac; and SendGrid founder Isaac Saldana.”

Read the full announcement on VentureBeat here.