Stop Building Dashboards and Get Answers with Coroot!

What if you could get full-stack observability without paying cloud vendor premiums or spending weeks building custom dashboards? In this episode, Peter Zaitsev, co-founder of Coroot, joins Darin and Viktor to discuss how Coroot approaches observability differently in a market crowded with over a hundred vendors.

The conversation covers what Peter calls "simplified observability," a philosophy built around reducing cognitive overload rather than overwhelming engineers with endless metrics and dashboards. Using eBPF technology, Coroot automatically instruments applications without requiring code changes or complex configuration, making it a practical choice for developers who need answers fast without building elaborate monitoring systems.

The episode also digs into how Coroot handles root cause analysis, combining deterministic methods to trace how errors propagate through microservices with AI-powered recommendations that hand off to LLMs for actionable fix suggestions. Rather than competing directly with cloud giants like Datadog and Dynatrace, Coroot focuses on teams that want a self-hosted, open-source alternative that prioritizes simplicity.

Darin and Viktor also explore Coroot's business model with Peter, including the decision to use Apache 2.0 licensing and how staying bootstrapped with minimal funding allows the team to focus on building the right product without chasing every hype cycle.