Rakuten's extensive portfolio of companies includes more than 70 distinct and entrepreneurial businesses. Within this diverse landscape, a core mission of the Rakuten Global Development Center (GDC) is to take technology developed to solve an internal problem and commercialize, nurture, and spin off that technology into a product for other companies.
Rakuten SixthSense was founded on a simple yet profound idea: to revolutionize how enterprises approach IT monitoring. Their solution, Unified Observability, represents a paradigm shift from fragmented monitoring systems to a centralized, integrated approach.
To explore this further, we invited Subhash Chandra, senior director of sales for Rakuten SixthSense, to speak at the Rakuten Cloud booth at a recent trade show. He explained precisely why unified observability is essential for modern enterprises seeking to gain complete control and understanding of their complex environments.
“We started to experiment on a couple of projects internally,” Chandra said. “We saw some good success deploying our observability tools at scale within Rakuten. That’s when we realized it was time to take this to market.”
Traditional observability tools are fragmented: one tool for infrastructure monitoring, another for application logs, and yet another for user experience tracking.
These silos slow down problem resolution and often lead to incomplete insights. Rakuten SixthSense challenges that model with an integrated, full-stack approach to observability—what it calls Unified Observability.
“We are one of the few platforms in the market that can offer end-to-end observability,” Chandra said. “From infrastructure and applications to APIs, data pipelines, and even LLMs—we cover it all.”
This breadth allows SixthSense to track the full digital journey—from the infrastructure layer to the end-user experience—while also monitoring AI model behavior, a capability that’s rapidly growing in importance.
One of Rakuten SixthSense's differentiators is its foundation in artificial intelligence. Unlike legacy platforms that are being retrofitted for AI compatibility, SixthSense was born in the AI era.
“Other observability tools were built before AI had really matured. We didn’t retrofit our platform—we embedded AI into its core from day one,” said Chandra.
This AI-first architecture powers smart features like auto root cause analysis, where the platform learns from incidents and preemptively alerts teams to prevent future failures. It also enhances the monitoring of LLMs and AI applications, offering observability into both performance and cost.
“Without the right data, your AI won’t give the right output,” Chandra emphasized. “That’s why we have built-in data observability to ensure models are functioning as intended. And since APIs are the gateway to everything in modern IT, our API security observability keeps those channels secure.”
This holistic view is rare in the observability space, where most vendors stop at application metrics or infrastructure monitoring. Rakuten SixthSense brings security, data integrity, and AI performance into a single, unified view.
Without the right data, your AI won’t give the right output. That’s why we have built-in data observability to ensure models are functioning as intended. And since APIs are the gateway to everything in modern IT, our API security observability keeps those channels secure.” - Subhash Chandra, senior director of sales for Rakuten SixthSense
Having already achieved early success in its home market of India and recently launched in Japan, Rakuten SixthSense is now expanding to the U.S. The platform is poised to help more enterprises navigate the growing complexity of IT operations.
Chandra envisions SixthSense not just as a product, but as a catalyst for a new generation of digital resilience and autonomous operations.
“We call ourselves a new age observability company,” he said. “Our vision is to help enterprises simplify the complexity of IT by making observability smarter, more integrated, and ultimately more human-centric.”
With Unified Observability, Rakuten SixthSense, empowers businesses with actionable insights across the full tech stack—so they can move faster, resolve issues proactively, and deliver better digital experiences at scale.
To watch Chandra’s complete presentation, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGYeFspisao
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