398: Ariel Assaraf, CEO and Co-Founder of Coralogix, on How AI Turns Observability into Business IntelligenceSend us Fan Mail
Ariel Assaraf is the CEO and co-founder of Coralogix, a leading observability platform that most recently raised $115 million at a unicorn valuation. He started the company in 2014, and today Coralogix serves more than 4,000 customers, monitors more than 500,000 applications, and processes over 3 million events per second.
Before co-founding Coralogix, Ariel served in Israel's Elite Intelligence Unit 8200, where the sheer scale and complexity of data he worked with made one thing clear: existing architectures weren't built for what was coming. He later joined Varent Systems, a homeland security company, leading automation, integration, and QA.
In this episode, Ariel draws on more than a decade of building at the frontier of data infrastructure to argue that observability is no longer just a tool for preventing downtime. It is becoming the most truthful, real-time source of intelligence any company owns.
In this conversation, we discuss:
• The evolution from the data collection era ("oil phase") to a landfill crisis, and now the AI-driven "brain phase" where telemetry has become the most valuable raw material for business decision making
• How Coralogix separates the data plane from the control plane, storing data in open format on the customer's own infrastructure to enable data ownership, infinite retention, and freedom from vendor lock-in
• Why Ariel invested over $100 million in R&D to build query engines that always return answers, not constrained by predefined schemas that agents will quickly exceed
• How SREs evolve from reactive incident responders into autonomous operators as agents like Ollie, Coralogix's AI agent, take over incident triage, root cause analysis, and narrative generation
• The emerging role of the AI-forward product manager who sits between customer needs and autonomous agents, reshaping how software gets built, priced, and sold in real time
• How Ariel thinks about linear versus exponential impact as a leadership principle, and why the intuition to prioritize exponential value is something agents will never replicate
Explore more in the conversation:
00:00 Welcome & AI's societal impact paradox
01:53 AI Fun Fact: New data on productivity and employment
04:15 Introducing Ariel Assaraf and the Coralogix origin story
05:15 Evolving data architecture: from oil to landfill to brain phase
07:28 Coralogix's data ownership and open format advantages
13:27 From telemetry data lake to autonomous, agent-driven analytics
20:00 Building scalable, answer-guaranteeing query engines for complex data
25:44 The future of natural language interfaces like Olly for SREs and DevOps
28:15 Orchestrating multiple AI agents for better decision-making
30:20 Responsibility, autonomy, and the evolving role of customer success
35:37 How Coralogix turns telemetry into strategic business decisions
38:18 Linear vs. exponential value in your career
Resources:
Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Ariel on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn How Personalized Healthcare Is Being Transformed Through AI and the Human Microbiome
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