Company Story
From “Black Box” to Big Green Button
Twenty years of building toward a single vision — and how OpsPilot finally realises it.
It began with a performance crisis. A high-stakes customer project running on ColdFusion, which, when it failed, gave engineers zero visibility into the cause. That challenge led co-founders David Tattersall and Darren Pywell to ask a fundamental question: what if debugging didn’t have to be guesswork? What if you could press a button and the solution appeared?
Two decades later, that founding question has its answer. OpsPilot — the AI observability intelligence platform — is the realisation of what David and Darren set out to build in 2005. In this interview, David reflects on the journey: the crisis that created the company, the resilience that saved it, and the technology that defines its future.
Founding Vision & Origins
What sparked the idea?
There was a very specific moment. In the early 2000s, we had built a large ColdFusion-based document management system for Hewlett-Packard. We constantly battled the same underlying problem: ColdFusion was a complete black box. When something went wrong, you couldn’t see inside it. Debugging felt like guesswork.
By summer 2005, my co-founder and CTO Darren built a small internal monitoring tool so we could finally see what was happening. The moment we used that prototype, everything clicked.
“If this is solving our pain, it will solve the pain for every developer.”
That was the moment OpsPilot’s story began — and the “Big Green Button” concept came to life. Our vision from day one was to create a solution that simply solved the problem. As straightforward as clicking a button.
How has that vision evolved?
Our early goal was simple: help developers find issues faster, fix them faster, and prevent them from happening again. “Find It. Fix It. Prevent It.” was our original slogan, and it still holds.
Over time, the vision expanded. We realised observability isn’t just about presenting dashboards. It’s about identifying the exact problem, explaining why it’s happening, and telling you what to do next.
With OpsPilot, we’ve taken the final step toward that original dream. A system that detects the problem, explains it, prioritises it, and helps resolve it. The Big Green Button is no longer a metaphor.
Innovation & Evolution
What were the defining milestones?
Across twenty years, there have been many. In 2008 we introduced the concept of server self-healing, received exceptionally well by customers. In 2015, we shipped our Production Debugger — the first technology in the world to enable safe, on-the-fly debugging directly in a live production JVM without impacting performance. Darren was awarded a patent for it. Customers are still amazed that it works.
But the ultimate turning point has been OpsPilot. We were early in recognising how profoundly AI would reshape observability. We had been part of the OpenAI beta programme for two years before ChatGPT even launched, which gave us a front-row seat to what was coming.
That early insight allowed us to release OpsPilot v1 in May 2023, making us one of the very first companies — if not the first — to integrate a generative AI engine directly into a commercial monitoring and observability platform.
Since then, OpsPilot has evolved from a feature into the centrepiece of the platform. It represents the culmination of everything we have been building toward for twenty years: transforming raw telemetry into understanding, explanation, and action.
What innovation are you most proud of?
Without question, OpsPilot. It completely changes how engineers interact with their systems. Instead of searching through dashboards or deciphering metrics, they can ask questions and get clear, structured, actionable answers. OpsPilot interprets telemetry, understands logs, reviews code, diagnoses anomalies, and recommends next steps. It becomes an intelligent teammate inside the workflow.
This shift — from data presentation to data understanding and action — is what OpsPilot represents. It redefines what observability can be, and marks the beginning of a new era where AI sits at the centre of how engineering, SRE, and DevOps teams operate.
Resilience Under Pressure
A defining moment that captures the journey
The 2008 financial crisis. At that time, our business rested on two pillars: our monitoring product and external software development work. We lost our largest development customer almost overnight as they outsourced development to lower-cost regions. In three months, 65% of company revenue disappeared.
We were celebrating our 10-year anniversary that year. It was far from certain we would make it to year eleven. Through sheer determination — and the tough decision for Darren and me to stop paying ourselves — we kept every employee on staff.
“That crisis became a turning point. It forced us to focus entirely on our product and commit to making it the centrepiece of the business.”
That difficult period shaped the company we are today: resilient, focused, and driven by long-term vision rather than short-term pressure.
The Road to OpsPilot
When did it become clear observability needed to change?
We realised very early that we had to grow beyond a single technology stack. The first signal came around 2010 when we built an analytics layer — our first step into storing telemetry and analysing it across time. It pushed us to think in terms of observability, not just monitoring.
But the real inflection point came when we joined the OpenAI beta programme, two years before ChatGPT launched. We understood immediately that AI would transform how engineers interact with data. That conviction led us to build OpsPilot.
The realisation didn’t happen all at once. It was a progression: from analytics, to cloud, to AI. But the destination was always obvious.
“Developers don’t need more data. They need systems that understand, interpret, and help them act on it.”
That’s the direction we committed to long before AI became mainstream. And in 2026, AI-driven reasoning has become the core of everything we do — which is why OpsPilot is now the platform itself, not just a feature.
Looking Ahead
If you could go back to the start, what advice would you give yourself?
Look beyond any single technology much earlier. The problems we were solving — visibility, debugging, root-cause analysis, performance insight — were always universal. If we had broadened our scope earlier, we could have accelerated OpsPilot’s evolution into the multi-language, cloud-native, AI-driven platform it is today. Our technology now serves many different environments. OpsPilot is taking that vision even further.
A message to customers, partners, and team
The past twenty years have been an extraordinary journey. None of it would have been possible without the trust of our customers or the dedication of the team behind us.
To our customers: thank you for trusting us with your applications, your performance, and in most cases, your mission-critical systems. Your feedback, challenges, and ideas have shaped OpsPilot into the platform it is today.
To our team: you are the heart of every innovation we have delivered — from that first prototype to groundbreaking debugging technology to the AI-driven future we are building together. Your creativity, resilience, and commitment to solving real-world problems have defined who we are.
“Thank you for believing in us, challenging us, and growing with us. The best isn’t behind us. It lives on in OpsPilot and the future we’re building together.”
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