A rook is a smart bird that is known for solving puzzles. Rookout picked the bird as their logo because their tool is like a little bird (can’t resist Game of Thrones reference) inside an application that can collect any piece of data users want from their applications in a very fast in and agile manner.

As it’s obvious by now, Rookout is a data collection and debugging platform that allows customers to collect any piece of data they want from the code as it’s running anywhere in the world – be it classic legacy servers, Kubernetes, or even in staging and production environment.

Rookout started out with its founders trying to scratch their own etch. Liran Haimovitch and Or Weis were both engineers and they felt so anachronistic that they couldn’t get a piece of data about how their software was behaving as soon as it’s left their laptops and got deployed.

“We have to go and write more code, re-deploy it, restart the application,” said Haimovitch expressing his frustration, “It could take anywhere from 15 minutes to sometimes a month, depending on your scenarios. In felt absurd. It’s my code running on my servers. Why can I just click a button and get the data?”

The duo had come across engineers, DevOps teams, VPs of R&D centers and CTOs who shared the same pain. It’s hard to get the data they needed from their applications.

Haimovitch and Weis started Rookout to solve the data collection and debugging problem.  But in the past two and a half years a lot of has changed. New technologies, new platforms, new infrastructure, new parading, and new use-cases have emerged.

Despite new technologies and new ways of deploying applications what has remained contestant is the need to collect any piece of data, in the easiest possible way. “As we are moving to higher level components, it’s becoming important to inspect programs as they are executed and get the data in real time,” said Haimovitch.

New concepts like Serverless and Kubernetes with active load balancing, stateless applications are posing new challenges. “It’s getting harder to get the data out. There is no longer a server that you can SSH into and attach a process to debug. You need to debug 20 to 50 servers at the same times. Some large-scale companies deal with thousands of servers and the traditional ways of collecting data don’t work anymore.

“Rookout was the first and still the only debugging solution to support serverless,” claimed Haimovitch.

As companies are breaking down the monoliths and moving to serverless they come across two problems: 1) all the legacy code that they have is no longer maintained as it used to be because the people who wrote that legacy code have left; 2)at the same time they are not that familiar with new concepts like Kubernetes. As a result, these companies are facing two battles at the same time.

“Rookout helps these companies with the transition to the cloud as we support everything from legacy workloads to cloud-native,” said Haimovitch.

Commenting on the trends that he saw after talking to customers, partners and even competitors, Haimovitch said that monitoring is becoming ever more important. “Companies are increasing their usage of monitoring tools. The majority of companies are utilizing Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and other tools,” he said “I think we’ve come to realize that with the rise of SaaS companies have come to realize that monitoring is critical piece to ensure that the service they provide to their customers is in excellent shape and I think Rookout is the natural evolution of that phase.”

Watch the full interview with Haimovitch on YouTube and also learn about what he does in his free time when he is not debugging your code.