Why WatchTeam exists
Most observability tools tell you something is wrong. Then they leave you to figure out what, why, and how to fix it. Your on-call engineer spends the first hour of every incident gathering context from five different tools, piecing together a timeline, and explaining what they're seeing to everyone on the call.
This is backwards. The investigation work—correlating events, tracing root cause, identifying what changed—shouldn't require a senior engineer with institutional knowledge. That's work a system can do.
"In nuclear propulsion, we didn't just fix symptoms. Every failure got traced to its root cause, and we implemented systemic fixes to prevent recurrence. That methodology—rigorous, documented, repeatable—is what software teams need."
The founding story
WatchTeam was founded by Dave Rogers, who spent years in the Navy's nuclear program learning root cause analysis the hard way—in an environment where failures aren't tolerated and "I don't know why it happened" isn't an acceptable answer.
After 16+ years in software engineering and a decade as a consultant and fractional CTO, Dave saw the same pattern everywhere: smart teams spending hours in war rooms, manually correlating logs and traces and metrics, rebuilding context that should have been captured automatically.
The observability tools kept getting more sophisticated, but the actual investigation still happened in engineers' heads. AI changed what's possible. Now we can apply systematic RCA methodology at machine speed—correlating events, identifying patterns, suggesting fixes—and free engineers to focus on the parts of the job that actually require human judgment.
What we believe
Investigation beats dashboards
Showing data isn't enough. The value is in synthesizing it—connecting the dots between a deployment, an error spike, and a cloud provider issue to tell you what actually happened.
Open standards matter
We're built on OpenTelemetry because vendor lock-in is bullshit. Your observability data is yours. You should be able to take it anywhere.
AI augments, humans decide
WatchTeam does the investigation and suggests fixes. Your team reviews the evidence and makes the call. We're not replacing engineers—we're giving them back the hours they spend on manual correlation.
Transparency over magic
Every conclusion we surface comes with the evidence chain that supports it. You should always be able to see why we think what we think.
Get in touch
We're building WatchTeam in public and talking to engineering teams every week. If you're dealing with incident management pain or just want to talk shop about observability, reach out.
Email: dave@watchteam.ai