WanAware promises less-expensive integration from what it says can be an infinite number of telemetry data sources into a high-powered observability platform that large Fortune 100 organizations already rely on.
As one of the more recently created observability startups, WanAware is uniquely positioned, having been previously developed internally to support 21Packets’ infrastructure and customers. The company’s founders promise extensive integration capabilities, significantly reducing the costs organizations typically incur when integrating observability or telemetry data feeds with other sources.
The platform extends and integrates with not only multiple data sources but at a significantly lower cost. This aspect of the offering is critical for those organizations that have numerous data feeds that might also be spread around the world geographically, Jeff Collins, chairman of WanAware, chief strategy officer/CISO and CEO of 21Packets, who holds other executive positions concurrently, said. “The reason why customers often come to us is they have resources all over the globe and they don’t have the ability to scale their observability platforms to support their environment. They don’t have teams that can operate it and they don’t have subject matter experts,” Collins said. “So, they need the ability to use an IT generalist and have an IT generalist run a platform to get that intelligence. That’s the reason why people are buying our platform.”
Among WanAware’s Fortune 100 customers, there is often a dearth of talent to integrate and manage very large-reaching observability needs. “Take our big oil and gas customers with an IT staff of 50,000 — they’ve come to us because they don’t have 10 extra people otherwise required without our platform,” Collins said.
WanAware is configured to provide API for integrations covering VMware, cloud providers such as AWS and Google, eBPF data feeds, OpenTelemetry or security platforms like CrowdStrike or Microsoft Defender. “We have APIs for those because if you think about most customers, they actually have systems that could give them their inventory. They just don’t have a good way of integrating it and it’s super expensive,” Collins said. “Now you can have a $300,000 integration cost just to get CrowdStrike integrated. So, we built our platform so that you can remove these costs, once you do that, then you can use our observability.”
WanAware’s core platform—outside of integrations—costs about $100 per month, Collins said, describing it as “super inexpensive and extremely scalable.” Millions of assets can be loaded into the platform. It supports full dependency and interdependency mapping on the backend. “So, everything that every other platform isn’t, we are — and it’s 99 bucks,” Collins said. “That’s kind of the idea behind it.”
Additionally, with what WanAware calls “workers,” or massive-scale crawlers, integrations cover eBPF, NetFlow, OpenTelemetry and other sources. “You can take that data and feed it into our platform, and you can search that for intelligence around what you already have while tying it in with the rest of your environment,” Collins said.
The Beginning
21Packets is a global software-defined network that’s primarily used to get customers into really hard-to-reach areas. Customers include oil and gas, NGOs and other organizations, often with a geographic presence around the world in hostile locations, including war zones.
“When you get outside of application observability, offerings from even major observability providers can be terrible,” Collins said. “About two years ago, a couple of our really big customers came to us and they said, “We’ve noticed that your ability to monitor not just your infrastructure, but ours and you guys are finding stuff no one else is finding, and your availability is extremely high. How do you guys do this?”
The then-21Packets engineers then started showing customers how and the customers started coming back and saying, “Well, can we buy this thing?” And we’re like, “We built this thing for us. We never built it for a customer.” Yeah.
Again, the platform’s ability to scale and integrate observability sources at scale is paramount, Collins said. The platform was originally designed for and is still used to manage observability for about 50,000 nodes inside of 21Packets. But that reach was initially not enough for customers such as large oil and gas companies. These organizations often sought a solution for visibility into their entire IoT and IT infrastructure for 50,000 nodes, often totaling hundreds of thousands of nodes. “At that point, we started rebuilding the platform — a scalable version of it — and that’s what we’re launching now,” Collins said.
Observability, at the End of the Day
WanAware is an observability platform at the end of the day, so organizations understandably want to know what they rely on for observability beyond the scaling benefits. The capabilities the company communicate include:
- Intelligent Visibility: The platform collects and analyzes over 10 billion globally connected IP addresses, refreshing data every four hours to provide real-time and historical insights.
- Contextual Awareness: Using over 10 trillion data points, WanAware applies AI, machine learning, and graph database infrastructure to contextualize and correlate data. This ensures organizations can identify patterns, behaviors, and critical risks with ease and before they occur, offering automated remediation workflows to minimize downtime and shift IT operations from reactive to predictive.
- Agentless Architecture: The platform’s agentless architecture eliminates the need for software rollouts or manual deployments, reducing costs and complexity while ensuring scalability across diverse IT environments.
- Business Impact Analysis: By analyzing the causal chain of IT issues, WanAware determines the Total Scope of Impact (TSOI), offering organizations a precise view of affected systems.
- Integrated Security and Compliance: With real-time threat detection, vulnerability scanning, and zero-trust principles, WanAware ensures robust security alongside comprehensive observability.
Unlike traditional observability tools, WanAware’s platform is designed for accessibility. Generalist IT teams can easily implement and operate the solution, eliminating the need for highly specialized expertise, WanAware said. This democratization of intelligent observability ensures organizations of all sizes — from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies — can harness its power. The platform’s ability to monitor both external and on-premises assets allows organizations to gain visibility across their entire IT ecosystem, including IoT devices, cloud services, and legacy infrastructure. WanAware’s approach reduces noise by prioritizing actionable events, saving teams from wading through unnecessary alerts.
“Observability should be intelligent, not complex,” Wes Jensen, COO at WanAware, said in a statement. “Our platform sets a new standard by delivering clarity and confidence to organizations navigating an increasingly connected and data-driven landscape.”
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