Our Seed Investment in Doctor Droid: Improving the Developer Experience for SRE & On-Call Teams

Engineers are hired with the promise to build platforms and products for the company. But when companies start scaling, operations become a big part of their role. It becomes a necessity for developers to often be “on-call” where they are expected to be available 24x7 to monitor and investigate for critical alerts. Often, dedicated SRE teams are made responsible for the initial investigation and troubleshooting.

During these investigations, they end up spending a significant amount of time going to different tools to get the right data and analyze them. Doing this manually often leads to escalations and delays in system recovery. What if the engineer could automate the manual toil of operations?

This is exactly what Doctor Droid’s PlayBooks platform does – it can automatically run investigations on production issues so that the engineer has all relevant data points available to them right when they check an alert. These automations leverage the existing PlayBooks created by the team. This significantly improves the developer experience during the on call by:

• Automatically fetching data from 15+ different tools
• Ease of collaborating or sharing past investigations on similar issues
• Leveraging machine learning & AI for automated interpretations & investigations

For one of the SRE teams Doctor Droid is working with, daily toil would take 4-6 hours of bandwidth everyday, for every engineer. After starting to use PlayBooks, it has now gone down to less than 30 minutes/day.

When we started interacting with the team, we learned that as engineering teams mature in their observability & monitoring journey, senior engineers in these teams spend time setting up processes and automations to reduce on-call escalations and resolve issues faster. Doctor Droid is today building a platform to help these senior engineers accelerate their journey towards automated investigations & superior developer experience. Here’s a short video demo about PlayBooks.

Dipesh Mittal & Siddarth Jain are the founders of Doctor Droid and have a deep understanding of the space. Dipesh has been a developer for over a decade. He started his career with PayPal where he was a software engineer. His next stint was at Shadowfax where he was leading the engineering team that managed the entire hyperlocal food delivery business for them. Siddarth Jain had been a data scientist at Shadowfax working on a variety of machine learning problems from Computer Vision to efficient Supply Demand matching. Most recently he was on the investment team at Accel where he spent time with developer tooling and SaaS companies.

I’m excited to share that Accel is leading a seed round in Doctor Droid along with YCombinator. In Doctor Droid, we see the potential to become a pivotal part of the observability & monitoring lifecycle.

– Prayank Swaroop