Rise Cuts the Cost of Observability at Programmatic Scale with groundcover

Rise processes an enormous volume of requests and events every day across the programmatic advertising ecosystem, and its observability bill had started to grow faster than the value it returned. Three months after moving to groundcover, the company runs the same dashboards, the same alerts, and the same near real-time picture of its infrastructure and even captured more comprehensively through eBPF, and at a cost structure that fits the traffic.

Our main challenge wasn't a lack of functionality. Our previous provider afforded us the observability capabilities we needed, but at Rise's scale, the cost had become extremely high. We needed to find a more cost-efficient way to maintain the same high standard of observability without compromising on the quality, accuracy, or real-time nature of our data.

— Gershon Brainin, R&D Director, Rise

About Rise

Rise is an ad tech company founded in 2021 and headquartered in Tel-Aviv, with over 100 employees. It operates in programmatic advertising, connecting the supply and demand sides of the ecosystem so its partners can buy and sell digital inventory more efficiently. Publishers and supply partners sit on one side, advertisers and demand partners on the other, across both web and in-app environments.

That business runs at a very high scale. Rise's systems handle an enormous volume of requests and events every day, and the health of those systems is the product. Gershon Brainin leads the Platform (Core) team, which owns the underlying operation and health of the system rather than client-facing features. The team works closely with DevOps and Operations and is among the primary consumers of observability data across the company. For teams like his, knowing what happened minutes ago, how many impressions came in, what the load looks like on a specific server is a working requirement, not a reporting nicety.

The Challenge: Nothing Was Broken Except the Bill

Most observability migrations start with a failure. Rise's didn't.

Before groundcover, Rise ran a competing observability platform as its primary system, covering dashboards, alerts, logs and monitoring across both infrastructure and applications. It worked. It was stable. Nobody lost a night's sleep over it, and no customer ever noticed it existed.

The problem was cost, not performance. As Rise's traffic grew, the cost of the incumbent platform grew with it, until the line item became hard to defend against what it delivered. The pressure was purely financial with no outages, no coverage gaps, no customer-facing incidents. The question was whether Rise could keep the same standard of visibility and stop paying an increasing premium for it.

The impact was primarily financial. The scale of our infrastructure made the cost of our existing observability setup increasingly difficult to justify. The goal was to significantly improve cost efficiency while maintaining the same technological standard and visibility.

— Gershon Brainin, R&D Director, Rise

There was a second, quieter problem underneath the cost one. The old model forced trade-offs Rise had absorbed rather than solved:

• Cost scaled with traffic, not with insight. Every increase in volume raised the observability bill whether or not it produced a better picture of the system.
• Sampling stood in for completeness. In the previous setup, both logs and reporting could rely on sampled data rather than capturing every event whether one in a hundred, or one in a thousand, depending on frequency.
• Every scaling decision carried an observability tax. Growth at Rise's volume meant the economics got worse, not better, which is the wrong direction for a company whose systems only get busier.

The trigger was straightforward: Rise set out to reduce the cost of observability without lowering the technological standard or giving up any of the visibility it already had.

Why groundcover?

Rise came to the evaluation with three non-negotiables such as highly accurate data, data as close to real time as possible, and a platform that could handle its scale cost-effectively, plus integrations with the tools already embedded in its workflows. Its Solutions team evaluated several platforms. groundcover was the one that cleared all three bars.

1. eBPF was the deciding technology, not a footnote. Rise had already seen what eBPF could do in other technical evaluations and specifically wanted it in the observability stack. Capturing telemetry at the kernel level, without instrumenting the applications themselves, was the property the team was shopping for.
2. Comprehensive capture instead of sampled guesses. The clearest technical win was reducing Rise's dependence on sampling. As Brainin put it: "With traditional sampling, you might capture one out of every hundred or thousand events, depending on the frequency. That inevitably affects the precision of the picture you're seeing." eBPF let Rise measure far more comprehensively, which fed directly into its accuracy requirement.
3. Real-time data that stays real-time at ad tech volume. Rise's teams need to know what the system did minutes ago, not last hour. groundcover held that freshness at a request volume where many platforms start trading latency for throughput.
4. A cost model that survives the scale. This was the whole reason for the search. groundcover let Rise keep its standard of observability while moving to a structure that no longer punished it for growing.
5. It fit the workflows Rise already had. Existing notification systems and email were already load-bearing parts of how Rise's teams get told something is wrong. groundcover plugged into them rather than asking Rise to rebuild around a new notification path.
6. A parallel run, not a leap of faith. Rather than cut over and hope, Rise ran groundcover alongside the incumbent platform and compared the data between the two systems before completing the transition. The comparison was the proof. "By the time we went live, we already had confidence in the data and the platform." Throughout, groundcover's team was hands-on — responsive, technically strong, and quick to work through questions with Rise's engineers.

Impact / Results

• Cost restructured, standard held. Rise moved to a significantly more efficient cost structure without giving up any of the observability it had before; the same technological standard, the same visibility, the same capabilities.
• A clean one-to-one replacement. groundcover took over as Rise's primary observability platform, carrying across the dashboards, alerts and monitoring its teams relied on. No parallel systems left running, no capability quietly dropped.
• Less dependence on sampling. Where logs and reporting previously leaned on sampled data, eBPF lets Rise measure far more comprehensively, giving the team greater confidence in what the numbers actually say.
• Insights from day one. The parallel run meant Rise validated groundcover's data against the incumbent's before cutting over. Time-to-first-insight after go-live was immediate, because the trust had already been earned.
• Workflows continued uninterrupted. A structured kickoff and validation process made sure each team kept the visibility it had before and knew how to work in the new platform. Rise's teams collaborate the way they always did; on a platform that costs a fraction of what it used to.

We're maintaining the technological standard and visibility we had before, but doing it much more cost-efficiently.

— Gershon Brainin, R&D Director, Rise

Today Rise actively uses groundcover for infrastructure and application monitoring, logs, dashboards, and alerting routed into existing notification systems and email to paint the day-to-day operational picture its Platform, DevOps and Operations teams work from. The company has begun exploring groundcover's tracing capabilities as the next extension of that footprint.

groundcover is a technically advanced observability platform that gives different teams visibility into the system from multiple perspectives, from infrastructure stability and errors to performance and cost, with granular access controls for different types of users.

— Gershon Brainin, R&D Director, Rise

Future / Next Steps

• Extend into distributed tracing. Rise has started exploring groundcover's tracing functionality to add request-level depth to the infrastructure and application picture it already has.
• Finish optimizing the current environment. Three months in, the priority is tuning the implementation, closing the remaining open technical questions, and confirming the platform performs consistently at Rise's scale before widening its role.
• Keep the technical dialogue running. Rise maintains an active conversation with groundcover's team about new and upcoming capabilities, and tests what's relevant as it ships — a relationship that matters as both Rise's infrastructure and groundcover's platform keep evolving.
• Expand to more teams over time. Usage today sits with the technical and operational teams that consumed observability before. Broadening that comes after the current environment is fully settled.