In case you missed it, on January 8, 2018, SolarWinds, “a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software…announced it has completed the acquisition of Loggly, Inc., a provider of cloud-based log monitoring and log analytics software. With the transaction, the company also will add to its team of world-class software engineering talent.”
Loggly, Inc., was founded in 2009 as a privately held company based in San Francisco, California. As of October 2017, Loggly had fifty-four employees and over ten thousand customers. Loggly technology records log data from any device without the need for a proprietary software agent to collect the data. Rather, it uses open-source technologies like Elasticsearch, Apache Lucene 4, and Apache Kafka to acquire the information it needs to analyse and trend the data received and present that information as a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud-based log management service provider.
SolarWinds was officially founded in 1999 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has been profitable since its founding. It got its start when it released its first products, TraceRoute and Ping Sweep, in early March, 1998. It then released its first web-based performance monitoring application in November 2001. SolarWinds went on to become a publicly traded company from 2009 until the end of 2015, when it became a private company once again. Starting back in 2007, when it was in preparation mode for its IPO, SolarWinds began making acquisitions. Over the years, these have included companies like Neon Software (in 2007), Kiwi (in 2008), TekTools (in 2010), TriGeo Network Security (in 2011), Hyper9 (2011), EminentWare (2012), RhinoSoft (2012), and several others. SolarWinds continues to enhance and advance its monitoring and trending capabilities and evolve its products and services in the cloud space today.
I think this is a good move for both Loggly and SolarWinds. SolarWinds has done a decent job choosing its acquisitions over the years. It has done a particularly good job expanding its portfolio of products to include several types of monitoring solutions in a variety of areas, including network management, system management, IT security, database management, and IT help desk. Now, it is expanding its offering in monitoring the cloud computing space. The Loggly acquisition expands the company’s cloud services offerings by complementing the application, infrastructure, and web performance management solution SolarWinds already has in place. It is not just the product acquisition, but also the engineering and analytics expertise that comes with it that, I believe, will help SolarWinds the most in the long run.
The company’s strategy is to deliver comprehensive, yet simple and disruptively affordable, full stack monitoring solutions built upon a command and seamlessly integrated SaaS solution. This strategy is the basis of the company’s overall vision of enabling a robust single view inside of the infrastructure, applications, and overall user experience.
One thing I have noticed and have been experiencing lately is the desire or need for more robust capabilities with any monitoring solution on the market today. I would almost say there is a race for the amount of data the different monitoring solutions are able to input and process. For all practical purposes, they are laying the groundwork for the introduction of more complex machine learning with these solutions. Monitoring and management cloud-based solutions is an area I believe is extremely suited for artificial intelligence (AI). I am willing to bet that most of you reading this post have heard of the concept of a self-healing data center, and this technology is moving to achieve this concept or dream.
I believe that before the end of the decade, we should start hearing about different kinds of acquisitions from the cloud monitoring platform companies. I think these companies will start focusing more capital and resources into AI and automation. Before we get to that point, I believe there will be a more immediate focus on providing automated resolutions to the issues that are currently found with the visibility into collected data from the traces, logs, metrics and overall end user experience. A small step heading into that direction is SolarWinds’ acquisition of Loggly, Inc.