Startup Highlight Inc. is looking to disrupt the application observability space with the launch of an open-source, full-stack monitoring platform it says provides more comprehensive feedback on usability problems and errors.

Today’s launch comes as Highlight closed on an $8 million seed funding round led by Afore Capital and Craft Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator (W23), Neo, Day One Ventures, Worklife Ventures, Fuel Capital and a number of angel investors.

Highlight believes it can make its presence felt in the highly competitive application monitoring industry, where it will compete alongside more established players such as Datadog Inc., New Relic Inc. and Splunk Inc. The startup says most existing observability platforms remain limited in their scope, with a focus on either user-side issues or back-end errors, but never on both.

According to Highlight, this is a disjointed approach that leads to a major gap in understanding regarding the holistic performance of applications and websites. When errors crop up, engineers are forced to manually collate and piece together data from the front- and back-ends to work out the root cause.

To solve this, Highlight has opted for what it says is a “full-stack” approach to observability, similar to how modern DevOps teams operate full-stack frameworks that blend front- and back-end development into a single codebase. It says its platform is unique because it combines three separate observability functions into one, namely front-end session replay, full-stack error monitoring and logging.

According to Highlight, the session replay tool provides insights into why bugs occur in web applications, while error monitoring alerts teams to issues before they escalate. Highlight’s logging tool, meanwhile, enables error search and alerting rules across the entire technology stack.

Highlight co-founder and Chief Executive Jay Khatri (pictured, adjacent) told SiliconANGLE the trend toward “full-stack development” brings new challenges that legacy observability tools don’t address. He said Highlight doesn’t just observe to detect issues. Rather, it observes to understand the application’s holistic journey.

“Legacy tools weren’t designed for the unique challenges this shift presents,” he said. “Highlight is not just another observability platform It’s the natural evolution of observability tools, crafted precisely for the needs of today’s full-stack frameworks like NextJS and Remix.”

With its trio of observability tools, Khatri said Highlight provides a more complete view of the entire stack, from the user interface to the back-end infrastructure, making it easier to identify and resolve issues without manually building data pipelines to work out the root cause. He said the difference between Highlight and platforms such as Datadog, New Relic and Splunk is that those tools only provide teams with pointed data about specific issues and errors, whereas Highlight actually connects the dots.

“While tools like Splunk, New Relic and Datadog offer insightful metrics and analytics, their products often operate in silos,” Khatri explained. “Highlight, on the other hand, integrates everything under one roof. We don’t just capture data – we interconnect it, presenting a unified and actionable view across the entire stack.”

One of Highlight’s most prominent angel investors is Calvin French-Owen, co-founder of Segment Inc., which was acquired by Twilio Inc. According to him, the problem Highlight solves is that monitoring teams still struggle to understand the user experience in most web applications.

“Often, teams require dozens of tools and hours of collaboration just to track down a single bug,” he explained. “This is where Highlight caught my attention – they’ve engineered a solution that brings together world-class screen replay with error tracking and logging into a single product. I’ve set it up for my own projects in minutes and it immediately starts yielding helpful data.”

Unlike some of its rivals in the observability market, Highlight has opted to take a fully open-source approach with its platform, inviting the community to aid in its development. According to Khatri, Highlight is a collaborative project that allows users to evolve and tailor the platform themselves, ensuring it will always stay relevant. Already, Highlight has fostered a thriving developer community that is continually contributing to its codebase, expanding the platform’s functionality, Khatri said.

“Being open-source is like having thousands of co-creators,” the CEO said. “We’re tapping into the collective genius of developers worldwide. We’ve had several open source contributors build out full SDKs for our product, which acts as validation of this approach.”

The approach has led to some impressive traction for Highlight, which now has more than 5,000 GitHub stars and more than 4,000 developers currently using its platform. Early adopters include the messaging app Beeper Inc., the addiction treatment center Stax Health Inc., artificial intelligence assistant startup Foobar Inc. and fintech platform Levro Inc.

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