Metafor Software: Tracking, Alerts, Reporting

Metafor Software helps organizations track unexpected changes happening in the system environment. It provides alerts when anomalies occur, so that users can take action immediately when inconsistencies occur that could result in errors or even downtime. The system automatically sends the report of the analyses, which can be automatically scheduled at any interval, to an email address.

Metafor Software helps organizations track unexpected changes happening in the system environment. It provides alerts when anomalies occur, so that users can take action immediately when inconsistencies occur that could result in errors or even downtime. The system automatically sends the report of the analyses, which can be automatically scheduled at any interval, to an email address. This will allow DevOps staff to the anomalies happening so immediate action can be taken.

The patent-pending algorithms of Metafor Software, which apply machine learning, enables the anomaly detection engine to monitor server configuration drifts across the cloud as well as inside data centres on premises. Metafor Software focuses on performance troubleshooting and application diagnostics to protect infrastructure from failing. At the moment they are also testing to find behavioral anomalies in addition to environment anomalies within the system. The behavioral anomaly detection functionality is currently in Alpha.

The big data startup was founded in 2010 by Jenny Yang, a former Senior Director at BDC Venture Capital, and Dr. Toufic Boubez, a serial entrepreneur and former Chief Architecture Web Services at IBM. Since April 2013 they have started providing their services as a free public beta.  The Canadian company, based in Vancouver, is one of a kind in the big data industry with their automated diagnostics instead of the common manual troubleshooting.

Since they were founded they have won several awards for their solution. In 2010 Metafor won the Generator Challenge – a competition created to recognize Vancouver’s most promising early-stage technology companies. In 2013 they were listed on the 2013 ICT Emerging Rockets list, as part of the Ready to Rocket recognition program. They were nominated because of the growing market opportunity, unique competitive position and must-have value proposition.

In the growing world of big data, where the data infrastructure and network environment keep growing due to the ever-increasing amount of data, anomaly detection will become increasingly important in the coming years. Metafor’s machine learning technique that is capable of learning system behaviour patterns will therefore have a lot of potential in the near future. They have received seed capital from Vanedge Capital, GrowthWorks and several Angels. The objective of Metafor is to build a product that can not only detect anomalies but also normalize them with a single click. An ambitious goal, but we believe they are on the right track. Therefore we give them a 7 bits rating.