The Story of Elastiflow: Building the Network Observability Layer for Cloud-Native Infrastructure

The Story of Elastiflow: Building the Network Observability Layer for Cloud-Native Infrastructure

Some companies are born from frustration. Others from opportunity. Elastiflow emerged from both—a network security engineer’s annoyance with expensive, inflexible tools colliding with the realization that cloud-native infrastructure was creating visibility blind spots that existing solutions couldn’t address.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Robert Cowart, CEO and Co-Founder of Elastiflow, shared the full arc of building a network observability company—from initial product experiments to finding product-market fit in the cloud-native space. This is the story of how a technical insight became a platform, and what happens when you’re willing to rebuild rather than iterate.

The Founding Insight

Robert’s journey started in network security, where he kept encountering the same problem across different environments. “I was working in network security at the time and I realized that there was a need for better network visibility and a lot of the tools that were out there were very expensive, proprietary, difficult to deploy and manage,” he explained.

This wasn’t a novel observation. Every network engineer knows legacy visibility tools are expensive and cumbersome. But Robert saw something others missed: the problem was getting worse, not better, as infrastructure evolved. The tools designed for data centers and physical appliances were fundamentally mismatched to emerging cloud architectures.

The founding thesis was simple: build network visibility tools that were actually accessible—open, flexible, and designed for how modern teams operate. The execution would prove far more complex.

The Open Source Gambit

Like many technical founders, Robert initially believed open source would unlock distribution. The logic was sound: release powerful technology for free, build adoption through usage, then monetize the enterprise features.

Elastiflow released a network flow collector as an open-source project. “We had released a network flow collector as an open source project that was based on Elastic and Logstash and got a fair amount of traction with that,” Robert recalled.

The downloads came. The GitHub stars accumulated. But conversion to revenue remained elusive. “One of the challenges with that is that it doesn’t necessarily build a business on its own and you need to figure out a way to monetize,” Robert noted.

This is where many open-source companies stall—trapped between free users who won’t pay and enterprise buyers who need features the open version doesn’t have. Robert’s team faced this reality head-on: they needed to build something distinct enough that customers would actually pay for it.

The First Pivot: Security’s Crowded Lane

Before finding their footing in observability, Elastiflow tried entering through the security door. Network detection and response seemed like a natural fit—take their visibility technology and position it for security use cases.

The product made sense. The positioning was logical. But the market timing was wrong. “We realized that we were probably a little bit early to that market,” Robert explained. “There was a lot of competing solutions already that were taking the oxygen out of the room.”

This is the brutal truth about timing: being early to a market isn’t much different from being wrong. The security space had established players with momentum, partnerships, and entrenched customer relationships. Breaking through would require either massive capital or a different angle.

Robert chose the different angle. Rather than fight incumbents in their stronghold, he started watching where infrastructure itself was moving.

The Cloud-Native Awakening

The real inflection point came from observing a fundamental shift in how companies were deploying workloads. Traditional VM-based infrastructure was giving way to containers and Kubernetes, and this transition was creating new visibility gaps.

“What we saw was there’s a massive shift going on from traditional VM based and appliance based workloads to cloud native container and Kubernetes based workloads,” Robert observed. This wasn’t just a trend—it was a platform shift that made existing monitoring approaches inadequate.

The critical insight: “The old way of doing things doesn’t work in these new environments.” Legacy visibility tools assumed stable, long-lived infrastructure. Cloud-native environments were ephemeral, distributed, and constantly changing. The mismatch created urgent pain.

But recognizing the opportunity was easier than seizing it. Elastiflow couldn’t just add Kubernetes support to their existing product. They needed to rebuild from scratch.

The Painful Rebuild

This is where the story gets uncomfortable. Elastiflow had a working product, paying customers, and momentum—even if it was in the wrong direction. Starting over meant throwing away accumulated work and betting everything on a new technical foundation.

“We realized that to really effectively do observability for those types of environments, we need to build a solution that is designed from the ground up to actually run in those environments, be deployed with the same CICD, GitOps type automation tools that devops teams are used to using,” Robert explained.

This wasn’t iteration—it was fundamental rearchitecture. New deployment model. New data collection approach. New integration patterns. For a bootstrapped company, this decision carried existential risk.

But the bet paid off. By building native to cloud environments rather than adapting legacy approaches, Elastiflow could claim differentiation that resonated with DevOps teams. They weren’t just compatible with Kubernetes—they were built for it.

Finding the Right Language

As the product evolved, so did the positioning. Early on, Elastiflow led with “network visibility”—technically accurate but limiting. The phrase boxed them into a mature category dominated by established players.

“We’ve also expanded our messaging to talk about cloud native network observability and network detection and response,” Robert shared. “That helps us from a marketing standpoint to better align with the problems that people are trying to solve.”

The shift to “observability” wasn’t cosmetic. It repositioned them from a point solution to a platform aligned with how modern teams think about infrastructure management. And it connected them to emerging technology trends.

“There’s a massive problem of lack of visibility in containerized and Kubernetes environments. eBPF is the latest, coolest buzzword that everybody wants to talk about,” Robert noted. “So being able to talk about how we use eBPF to provide that visibility definitely helps capture mindshare when we’re talking to prospects.”

This is strategic positioning: connecting your technology to the language buyers are already using and budgets they’re already allocating.

Building the Sales Motion

With product-market fit emerging, Elastiflow needed a repeatable sales process. They chose a hybrid approach that combined self-service with direct sales.

“We have a product led growth motion where people can download and try our community edition free of charge,” Robert described. This generates inbound interest and lets technical evaluators validate the technology independently.

But enterprise deals require human engagement. “We’re primarily focused on direct selling. So we have an outbound motion. We also have a good amount of inbound that we get through our website, through people that are downloading and trying our community edition.”

The model works because they’re not forcing a single path. Small teams can self-serve. Enterprise buyers get white-glove treatment. Each segment moves through an appropriate motion.

The Vision: Becoming Infrastructure Standard

Looking ahead, Robert’s ambition extends beyond being a successful niche player. He sees Elastiflow becoming foundational infrastructure—the default choice for network observability in cloud-native environments.

“Our long term goal is really to become a de facto standard for network observability in these cloud native environments,” Robert explained. “We want to be the solution that when people are deploying Kubernetes clusters or containerized workloads, they automatically think about deploying Elastiflow alongside those to provide that visibility.”

This isn’t about incremental growth—it’s about achieving ubiquity. The comparison Robert draws is telling: just as monitoring tools like Prometheus became assumed components of cloud infrastructure, Elastiflow aims to be the assumed solution for network visibility.

The path to that vision requires continued product development, ecosystem integration, and market education. But the foundation is in place: a cloud-native architecture, growing adoption in target segments, and positioning that aligns with where infrastructure is heading rather than where it’s been.

What Comes Next

Elastiflow’s story is still unfolding. The company has navigated multiple pivots, rebuilt its core technology, and found product-market fit in a competitive market. But the hardest work may still be ahead—scaling from a successful product to an infrastructure standard.

Robert’s journey offers a template for technical founders navigating similar transitions: be willing to rebuild when architecture mismatches market needs, position for where infrastructure is going rather than where it is, and recognize that finding product-market fit often means abandoning your original plan entirely.

For Elastiflow, success won’t be measured in features shipped or logos won. It will be measured by whether “network observability” becomes synonymous with their platform—the way Kubernetes became synonymous with container orchestration. That’s the vision Robert is building toward, one cloud-native deployment at a time.