Sawmills helps DevOps and platform teams get observability costs under control by cleaning up telemetry before it reaches their monitoring tools. Logs and metrics pass through a pipeline that filters, enriches and routes them in flight, so tools such as Datadog, Splunk and New Relic receive less noise and more useful data.
Sawmills sits in front of existing observability tools and works alongside them rather than replacing them.
At A Glance
| Vendor | Sawmills |
|---|---|
| Category | Telemetry and observability data management |
| Deployment | Sawmills Collector based on OpenTelemetry, managed by a Remote Operator control plane; multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premises |
| Agentic AI | Mills telemetry operator and the Instrumentation Agent in pull requests and CI |
| Customers | BigPanda, VIA |
| Funding | Seed round, backed by Team8, Mayfield and Alumni Ventures |
| Market classification | Security Operations |
What Sawmills Does
Observability bills grow quickly because applications emit far more telemetry than teams ever look at, and much of it is high cardinality, duplicated or simply noisy. Sawmills analyses that data continuously and changes it in real time, so the expensive backends only ingest what is worth paying for. The work is organised around three stages of the telemetry lifecycle: pre deployment, where instrumentation is written; runtime, where pipelines process data; and self service, where teams set the guardrails that the automation follows.
Products
Telemetry Pipeline
The telemetry pipeline processes data on its way to its destination. Built-in processors let teams set up a pipeline quickly, and it can route to any OpenTelemetry compatible source or destination. It handles logs and metrics, and every pipeline and collector can be monitored and controlled from one interface. It is the product for teams that want to cut ingest volume without losing the signals they rely on during incidents.
Agentic Monitoring
Agentic monitoring keeps watch over production telemetry around the clock. Mills recommends routing, filtering, enrichment and drop changes as patterns shift, and engineers review and tune them in Slack, Microsoft Teams or the Sawmills UI, so cost control becomes an ongoing process rather than a quarterly clean-up.
Instrumentation Agent
Many telemetry problems start in code. The Instrumentation Agent runs inside pull requests and CI pipelines and catches them before they ship:
- Flags high cardinality data, payload dumps and sensitive data
- Warns developers about noisy or expensive instrumentation
- Proposes a fix that can be applied from Slack, Teams or the Sawmills UI
How It Works
Sawmills uses a collector and control plane design.
| Sawmills Collector | The central component, based on the OpenTelemetry Collector, which receives and processes telemetry. |
|---|---|
| Remote Operator | The control plane that manages how Collectors behave in the field. |
| Pipelines | Chains of sources, processors and destinations. One pipeline can run on many Collectors, and one Collector can run many pipelines. |
| Destinations | The endpoints that receive processed data. |
Deployments can be distributed to handle high-throughput telemetry, and the platform runs across multi-cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments. Because it is built on OpenTelemetry, customers avoid lock-in to a proprietary agent.
Agentic AI Capabilities
Mills is designed as an operator, not a copilot. It runs telemetry pipelines on its own, and DevOps teams decide where the guardrails sit and which changes need approval. Its abilities come as skills, each combining telemetry knowledge, reasoning and the ability to act. Users can write their own skills alongside the built-in set:
- Cost optimisation and pipeline visibility
- Deployment status and processor management
- Data enrichment and telemetry ownership
- Workflow automation and task management
Integrations
| Area | Integrations |
|---|---|
| Standard | OpenTelemetry Collector and any OTel compatible source or destination |
| Observability backends | Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Prometheus, Elasticsearch |
| Storage | Amazon S3 |
| Collaboration | Slack, Microsoft Teams |
Company Background
| Founders and leadership | Ronit Belson, CEO and co-founder; Erez Rusovsky, CPO and co-founder; Amir Jakoby, CTO and co-founder. |
|---|---|
| Funding | Came out of stealth in 2025 with a $10 million seed round. |
| Investors | Team8, Mayfield and Alumni Ventures. |
Note: This overview is compiled from Sawmills’s publicly available information as of 3 November 2026. It is provided for information only. NHI Mgmt Group does not endorse any vendor, and nothing on this page represents the opinions of NHI Mgmt Group.