Fiberplane

# Fiberplane: High-Level Overview

Fiberplane is a developer-focused observability and incident response platform that enables site reliability engineers (SREs) and DevOps teams to collaborate in real-time during system outages.[2] The company builds collaborative notebooks and open-source tools that integrate with existing observability stacks, allowing teams to pull in various data types, work together to resolve incidents, and maintain a natural audit trail of the resolution process.[2][5]

The platform addresses a critical pain point in modern infrastructure management: the fragmented, time-consuming nature of incident response. Rather than jumping between multiple tools and communication channels, Fiberplane provides a unified workspace where multiple engineers can simultaneously investigate and resolve production issues—similar to how Google Docs enables collaborative document editing.[2] The company serves engineering teams at organizations running distributed systems, where outages require coordinated expertise across multiple specialists.

# Origin Story

Fiberplane was founded in October 2020 by Micha "mies" Hernandez van Leuffen, who previously founded and served as CEO of Wercker, a CI/CD platform acquired by Oracle in 2017.[3] The founding insight emerged directly from Hernandez van Leuffen's experience at Oracle: he recognized that DevOps teams and SREs lacked the collaborative tools that other departments took for granted.[2] While product teams used Google Docs for real-time collaboration, incident response remained siloed and inefficient.

The company achieved early validation quickly, raising a €7.5 million seed round in September 2021—approximately $8.8 million USD—co-led by Crane Venture Partners and Notion Capital, with participation from Northzone, System.One, and Basecase Capital.[2] By 2023, Fiberplane had expanded its product vision beyond incident response notebooks, launching Autometrics Explorer, an open-source observability tool designed to give every engineer insight into code performance at the code level.[3] The company has grown from 13 employees at the time of its seed announcement to 20-50 employees as of 2023.[2][3]

# Core Differentiators

• Collaborative-first design: Unlike traditional observability tools built for specialists, Fiberplane emphasizes group editing and real-time collaboration, reducing the friction of incident response workflows.[2]

• Low-cost, accessible observability: Autometrics and Explorer provide consistent, digestible metrics without steep learning curves, leveraging open-source foundations to reduce both monetary costs and training overhead.[3]

• Code-level insights: Autometrics Explorer redefines observability by bringing performance visibility directly to the code level, eliminating the traditional barrier between development and operations.[3]

• Integration-native architecture: The platform is designed to integrate data sources from existing observability stacks rather than forcing teams to rip-and-replace their infrastructure.[5]

• Founder credibility: Hernandez van Leuffen's track record building and scaling Wercker (acquired by Oracle) brings both technical depth and startup experience to the team.[3]

# Role in the Broader Tech Landscape

Fiberplane operates at the intersection of two major trends reshaping software engineering: the shift toward distributed systems and microservices and the democratization of developer tools. As systems become more complex and outages more costly, the need for faster incident response has become a competitive advantage. Traditional observability platforms—built for specialists and requiring extensive training—create bottlenecks precisely when speed matters most.

Fiberplane's emphasis on accessibility and collaboration reflects a broader industry movement toward developer experience (DX) as a core product differentiator. Companies like Notion, Figma, and Vercel have demonstrated that tools designed with user experience at their center can capture significant market share, even in crowded categories. By bringing collaborative editing and code-level observability to incident response, Fiberplane is helping to professionalize and democratize a critical but historically fragmented practice.

The company's backing by Crane Venture Partners—a firm focused on infrastructure and developer tools—signals confidence in this thesis. Additionally, Fiberplane's open-source strategy (Autometrics is open-source) positions it to build community momentum and become a de facto standard, similar to how other open-source projects have shaped infrastructure tooling.[3]

# Quick Take & Future Outlook

Fiberplane is well-positioned to capture share in the observability market by solving a problem that existing vendors have largely ignored: making incident response collaborative and accessible. The company's evolution from incident response notebooks to a broader observability platform (Autometrics Explorer) suggests ambitions to become a comprehensive SRE workbench—a vision articulated by founder Hernandez van Leuffen in 2021.[2]

The timing is favorable. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures and face pressure to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), tools that accelerate incident response and reduce cognitive load will become essential. Fiberplane's open-source strategy and focus on developer experience position it to build network effects and community adoption—potential moats that proprietary observability vendors struggle to match.

Looking ahead, the company's success will likely depend on its ability to expand beyond incident response into the broader SRE workbench vision while maintaining the simplicity and accessibility that differentiate it. If Fiberplane can establish itself as the collaborative nerve center for infrastructure teams, it could influence how the entire industry approaches observability and incident management.