These IIT Delhi Batchmates Created A Startup That Uses AI To Ward Off IT Infrastructure Anomalies

Over the past few years, India has witnessed an explosion of startups in analytics and artificial intelligence domain. With India’s lucrative analytics market expected to grow by seven times in the next few years, the startups today are equipped with more than just tech in their portfolio. ArchSaber is one good example proving its mettle in leveraging AI under its hood of intelligent analytics.

Started by Ashish Gaurav, Apoorv Garg and Arpit Jain, ArchSaber is an analytics startup based in Bengaluru. The founders, who were batchmates at IIT Delhi, worked with noted companies like Google, Zomato and Alphagrep, before forming ArchSaber. At its core, the startup provides AI-based, real-time solutions in IT infrastructure & application performance management. Recently, in June 2018, it was one of the startups selected under NetApp’s Excellerator program, where NetApp has permitted equity-free grant to ArchSaber.

Arpit Jain, who got in touch with Analytics India Magazine, elaborated on ArchSaber’s platform and told us how it was different from monitoring tools for IT infrastructure currently available in the market. “Other monitoring tools just do bare monitoring of infrastructure & applications. There is no intelligence on top of monitoring. The end user (DevOps engineer) has to look at a huge volume of data generated by these tools (in the form of graphs, logs etc) and manually form a model in his head figuring all the correlation and causality,” he said.

“This is really stressful, takes a lot of time and in some cases, is not humanly possible to analyse thousands of metrics coming from a huge IT infrastructure. Plus all this time, the service is impacted and the end users experience degraded performance. ArchSaber is exactly the layer of intelligence that the DevOps engineer needs. It provides a complete diagnosis (in the form of a chain of events) for each IT incident. As a result, the engineer’s job is reduced simply to the resolution as the diagnosis is already done for him/her,” he further explained.

With a stern focus on providing actionable diagnosis on time, ArchSaber’s platform ensures that the complexity is reduced at all levels of monitoring and diagnosing IT incidents. As a consequence, one of the challenges the startup faced earlier was gaining the trust of the customers since IT data is usually private in companies. Thus, they tested this platform on a smaller ecosystem before scaling it largely for customer companies.

Real-Time Diagnosis Through ML

Jain also tells us that real-time solutions are possible thanks to ML algorithms behind their platform. These models draw out an enterprise’s infrastructure graphically, thereby capturing causality and interdependence among all the services, applications and other elements during IT incidents or downtimes. The platform learns continuously regarding incident scenarios and is backed by the core dynamic dependency model

Serving a host of client enterprises such as Zomato, Delhivery, Lenskart, Hypertrack, Inshorts plus others, ArchSaber’s aims to expand their reach even more to the developer community. “We’re in talks with a leading payment gateway company and a global automotive player for a proof of concept.” quotes Jain.

When it comes to the technology powering their platform, ArchSaber makes use of open-source software available in the tech space. Speaking on this, Arpit briefs on the startup’s tech ecosystem, “At our core backend, we use a low latency time series database, micro-services to gather and aggregate metric data and services that learn the dependencies in real time and flag anomalies etc. Our dashboard too has been built with modern technologies keeping in mind the best possible human-computer interaction principles in general.”

Data Science For Competitive Advantage

Data science is ArchSaber’s unique proposition. “While our competitors focus on monitoring and other elements of AIOps like smarter alert routing etc, our focus on solving the problem of diagnosing IT incidents with by providing actionable insights into the performance of individual micro-services and the system as a whole, and this gives us a unique place in the industry.” says Jain confidently.  

With the team’s resolute focal point being their analytics engine, ArchSaber aims to improve value addition significantly in their solutions offered to customers. Furthermore, to broaden their reach into the tech community, they are planning to go with digital marketing and community building initiatives in the near future. Overall, ArchSaber looks to be a promising startup by leveraging AI and data science.