Server monitoring gets hot
SolarWinds, which monitors multi-vendor technologies running in house, last week bought Librato to extend its reach into the cloud. Librato is noted for its ability to watch workloads running in Heroku and Amazon Web Services as well is in internally-run Rails, Node.js, Ruby, Rails and Java applications.
Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds is betting that, despite the hype, most companies will not move everything to a public cloud or a SaaS vendor but will want ways to monitor workloads whether they are running in the server room down the hall, in AWS US-East or wherever.
For the $40 million purchase price SolarWinds “gets a way to bridge on-prem and cloud worlds and provide visibility across both,” Kevin Thompson, Solarwinds president, (pictured above) said in an interview.
The goal is to give “IT and devops pros a way to manage everything from on-prem to cloud and everything in between or we can’t guarantee a level of performance,” he said.
That’s a tall order. But it’s also a potentially huge market as it’s increasingly clear that most big tech buyers will continue to spread their bets between private and public resources.
Solarwinds will not, however, meld Librato’s cloud monitoring service in with its existing services but rather field discrete services so customers can buy what they need, he said.
It started down this road to cloud by purchasing Pingdom, a website and application monitoring company, in June. Librato is more about monitoring infrastructure at all layers in cloud environments, according to SolarWinds.
There’s been a flurry of activity in server monitoring over the past year. In May, Google purchased StackDriver, which provided monitoring tools for AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Three months later Idera bought Copperegg, another server monitoring product.
Investors are paying attention. Last week another server monitoring entry, Datadog, snagged $31 million in new funding bringing its total funding to more than $50 million. Other entries in this space include Boundary and Server Density.
What’s that again? Amazon to break out its cloud numbers?
But the really big news in cloud last week was all about AWS accounting. Amazon always talks about how transparent it is. And yet, the size of its clearly huge AWS business was treated like a state secret, hidden inside another category — which also includes sales of various and sundry other stuff including co-branded credit cards. That left pundits to guestimate its size. (My favorite anecdote is when an Amazon employee complained to me about Microsoft being opaque in claiming Azure was a $1 billion business a few years back. FWIW, I agreed that the Azure number was fuzzy at best, but oh the irony that Amazon, of all companies would complain about that.