Author: Mike Vizard

Splunk this week at its online.conf20 conference revealed it has acquired Plumbr, a provider of an application performance management (APM) platform, and signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rigor, a provider of synthetic monitoring and application optimization tools.

Both platforms are destined to be integrated with the Splunk Observability Suite, a suite of IT management tools the company launched this week as well.

Splunk CTO Tim Tully said the goal is to provide a full-fidelity platform that leverages machine learning algorithms to observe IT environments in real-time.

Plumbr, which includes real user monitoring capabilities as part of its platform, will extend real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities, currently in beta, that Splunk has developed on its own.

Tully said Splunk is also committed to making its platforms available across hybrid cloud computing environments by leveraging cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker containers, Envoy, Istio and Terraform.

Splunk has embraced observability, a core tenet of best DevOps practices, as part of an effort to provide a range of digital experience management capabilities at a time when many organizations are accelerating their investments in digital business transformation initiatives. Splunk last year acquired SignalFX for more than $1 billion to gain access to another APM platform that would expand its reach beyond its core IT operations analytics platform.

It’s not quite clear how many platforms and services will ultimately make up the Splunk Observability Suite. The company is clearly moving toward a model for consuming its services based on value rather than the amount of data collected. Determining that value will naturally be different for each customer, but in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressure to reduce IT costs has intensified. In many cases, the cost of acquiring an observability platform can easily be justified by eliminating the licensing fees organizations pay to employ a dozen or more tools from different vendors that typically are not integrated.

Competition across providers of observability tools has also intensified. In addition to every provider of an APM platform recasting itself as a provider of observability tools, there is a range of startups that address all or some aspect of observability. A wave of consolidation among providers of observability tools and platforms is all but inevitable.

Much of the focus on observability is being driven by the rise of microservices-based applications that have levels of dependencies requiring a level of context to successfully manage what isn’t possible to achieve by relying on legacy tools that monitor applications and infrastructure in isolation. The lack of integration is also one of the primary reasons why IT teams waste so much time in “war rooms” trying to deduce the root cause of an issue, which, once discovered, only takes a few minutes to fix.

Splunk, of course, enjoys a considerable advantage in the observability wars. Its core IT operation platform is widely employed by internal IT operations and security teams. However, much of the transition to observability is being driven by DevOps teams who take the lead when it comes to instrumenting applications. Many of those teams are far less committed to any specific platform no longer how established it may be.