Epsagon

Epsagon built an automated distributed tracing platform that provided end-to-end visibility into cloud-native, serverless, and microservices-based applications. The platform automatically instrumented applications to trace requests across services, functions, and APIs—generating visual service maps, identifying performance bottlenecks, and detecting errors without requiring manual code instrumentation or complex configuration. The core innovation was eliminating the operational burden of manual code instrumentation, which had been a significant friction point for developers adopting observability tools. By deploying lightweight agents that automatically captured distributed traces, Epsagon enabled organizations to gain visibility into production systems within minutes rather than weeks.

Commercially, Epsagon competed in a rapidly consolidating observability market. The distributed tracing segment was dominated by established APM vendors like Datadog and New Relic, while also competing against Lightstep (acquired by ServiceNow), open-source solutions like Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, and specialized vendors such as Honeycomb. The market was characterized by strong secular growth in cloud adoption, increasing complexity of microservices architectures, and widespread recognition that traditional APM tools were inadequate for serverless and container-native workloads. Founded in 2018 in Tel Aviv by Nitzan Shapira (CEO) and Ran Ribenzaft (CTO), both veterans of IDF elite intelligence units, Epsagon assembled a tightly focused engineering team that demonstrated both technical depth and execution discipline. The company raised approximately $12M in venture capital from respected investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, StageOne Ventures, and US Venture Partners—a reasonable but modest seed/Series A round that reflected the company's bootstrap-efficient approach and the competitive intensity of the observability market. Cisco's 2022 acquisition of Epsagon represented validation of the automated instrumentation approach and integration into Cisco's broader cloud and observability strategy alongside AppDynamics and ThousandEyes.

From a defense and national security perspective, distributed tracing and automated observability for cloud-native applications represents a critical enabling capability as military and intelligence systems migrate to microservices and cloud architectures. The ability to trace requests across geographically distributed defense applications, identify performance bottlenecks in mission-critical systems, detect anomalous behavior indicative of compromise, and rapidly troubleshoot failures in operationally sensitive environments directly supports defense cloud modernization initiatives and DevSecOps maturation. Defense organizations operating increasingly containerized and cloud-native deployments face acute observability challenges: legacy APM tooling is incompatible with ephemeral infrastructure, manual instrumentation introduces operational security risks and deployment delays, and vendor lock-in concerns constrain tool selection. Automated distributed tracing addresses these pain points and represents a direct defense relevance factor, particularly for Department of Defense cloud modernization efforts, military software-defined networking, and classified cloud environments requiring full observability without external dependencies.