Most companies don't realize they're filtering out the majority of their observability data until the bills arrive. By then, it's too late—millions spent on telemetry tools, with much of the actual data discarded before anyone examines it. Ari Zilka, a veteran of the enterprise infrastructure wars, thinks the entire model is upside down.
His solution? Move the intelligence upstream. Put the filtering, the analysis, the decision-making right where the data gets generated—in the customer's own cloud, before any vendor can meter it. That's the premise behind MyDecisive, Zilka's San Francisco-based startup, which announced $12 million in seed funding on July 15, 2026, and unveiled two products: an open-source foundation called SmartHub and a commercial platform named Octant.
The pitch sounds almost too simple. Install MyDecisive's software in your infrastructure, let it analyze and route telemetry data in real time, and watch observability costs drop—the company claims by as much as 90 percent, though this remains a vendor assertion rather than an independently verified benchmark. Whether that holds up in practice remains to be seen, though the company points to anonymous case studies describing savings in the millions.
A Bump in the Wire, With Memory
At its core, SmartHub positions itself as middleware—what Zilka calls "a bump in the wire"—sitting between applications and the observability backends most enterprises already use: Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, the usual suspects. Built on Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry, it processes logs, metrics, and traces as they flow, applying filtering, PII redaction, and anomaly detection before anything travels downstream.
The company claims nearly 90 percent reductions in total operating costs for production systems. Anonymous customer examples on the MyDecisive website mention $2.4 million saved in SIEM and pipeline expenses for one client, $1.5 million for another—though these case studies lack customer names and independent validation. According to the company, the platform is already handling production loads across financial services, retail, telecom, and healthcare—though no customers have gone on the record.
What sets SmartHub apart, Zilka argues, is "stateful, in-stream analytics." In an interview earlier this year with TechTarget, he drew a line between his approach and that of Cribl, a leader in the pipeline space. Cribl, he suggested, is fundamentally an ETL tool—effective at transformation but limited in memory. SmartHub, by contrast, includes what the company describes as an "inbuilt partitioned memory grid," enabling more sophisticated real-time decision-making on live data. Whether that distinction matters to enterprises is an open question.
Open Source as Strategy, Not Just Marketing
MyDecisive open-sourced the Smart Telemetry Hub late last year and contributed Datadog Logs ingest support to the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib project—a move that expanded the open-source ecosystem's ability to handle Datadog-formatted logs. That contribution appeared in version 0.140.1 around December, a signal that the company is investing in community credibility, not just its own product.
Octant, the commercial layer, became generally available on July 15, 2026. It adds governance controls, automated runbook execution, anomaly detection with cloud auto-scaling, and security log optimization. The company claims deployments take a single day, a timeline that suggests pre-built integrations and opinionated defaults—or perhaps a generous definition of "deployment."
All of SmartHub's deployment options, from app-local to centralized, run inside the customer's environment. Not as SaaS. Not as a managed service. The sovereignty angle is central to MyDecisive's positioning. A blog post published in May, titled "The $80 Billion Cloud Trap," puts it bluntly: "sovereignty without open source is still lock-in."
Pipeline Wars Get Crowded
MyDecisive is hardly alone in recognizing the observability cost problem. The pipeline market has gotten increasingly competitive. Cribl Stream routinely cuts data volumes by 30 to 50 percent, according to the company. Datadog launched its own Observability Pipelines product to help customers optimize logs and metrics before routing them to SIEM tools or data lakes. Tenzir offers security-focused pipelines with real-time threat intelligence processing.
MyDecisive's bet is that stateful analytics and an open-source foundation create meaningful differentiation. The company frames itself as closing a "control gap" that exists when observability vendors control both the pipeline and the backend. By running entirely in the customer's cloud, SmartHub promises to eliminate vendor lock-in while still delivering advanced telemetry processing.
That theory is cleaner than the reality of enterprise procurement. Whether the approach resonates will depend on SmartHub's adoption in the open-source community and whether those claimed cost savings hold up under independent scrutiny. So far, the 90 percent figure is a vendor assertion, not a verified benchmark.
The Terracotta Pedigree
Zilka isn't new to enterprise infrastructure fights. He founded Terracotta, an in-memory data grid company that Software AG acquired in 2011. He later held executive roles at Hortonworks and worked as an early architect at Walmart.com—experience that presumably taught him where enterprises feel the most pain.
The $12 million seed round signals investor confidence in both the founder and the thesis. Copper Sky Capital (formerly AZ-VC before a rebrand earlier this year) typically backs seed and Series A rounds in infrastructure and developer tools, with managing partners Jack Selby and Jason Pressman steering the firm's bets across the American Interior.
MyDecisive lists somewhere between 11 and 50 employees on LinkedIn, a range that's more vague than reassuring. The company is actively publishing engineering content—a June blog post detailed its contribution of intelligent rate limiting to OpenTelemetry—suggesting ongoing investment in the open-source foundation rather than just the commercial product.
The Adoption Gamble
Now comes the hard part. Open-source foundations can build developer momentum and community goodwill, but commercial success in observability requires displacing entrenched vendors and changing procurement behavior. Enterprises don't swap out observability stacks lightly, even when costs spiral.
MyDecisive's bet is that the pain of runaway telemetry bills will eventually force a reckoning—that companies will demand control over their own data, on their own infrastructure, before it ever hits a vendor's pricing model. It's a reasonable thesis. Whether it's correct depends on how much enterprises actually want to own that problem rather than outsource it.
For now, the company has funding, a founder with credibility, and an open-source foundation that at least gives it a shot at building community trust. The rest—customer names, independent benchmarks, proof that the savings are real—will have to come later.
