Tag: SignalFx

Posted on

Cortex raises $15M Series A to help development teams wrangle their microservices

Cortex, a startup that helps engineering teams get improved visibility into the Rube Goldberg machine that is their microservices architecture and improve their overall development practices around it, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital, which led the company’s $2.5 million seed round. A number of angel investors, including Gokul Rajaram, Snyk CEO Peter McKay and Front co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin, also participated in this round.

Current customers include the likes of Grammarly, 8×8 and Rappi. Cortex says it experienced 10x customer growth since its launch in May 2021 (though we’re probably talking about a relatively low baseline here).

The company’s mission is to build a system of record for engineering teams — or at least those that adopt modern development practices. It’s this services catalog that’s at the heart of what Cortex does and it was also the first product the team launched. Now it is starting to build out its features around this catalog.

“We very quickly realized that once you have all these microservices being tracked in this catalog, you can do some interesting things there,” Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta said.

Image Credits: Cortex

“Engineering leaders have very limited visibility into which teams are performing well or need additional resources across critical initiatives and reliability, security and just overall adoption of best practices,” said Cortex co-founder and CEO Anish Dhar. “On the other hand, you see teams like SRE, security and platform, who are still stuck using Excel spreadsheets, tracking hundreds, sometimes thousands of services across several teams. How do you actually align these teams and drive consistency?”

The goal here is to give engineering leaders insights into the quality of their services, but also to help the engineers themselves understand what services are available and what their status is.

That means a team can use Cortex to define its production readiness, for example, by setting up a checklist of criteria a service needs to meet before it’s ready to be pushed live (this could include a dashboard, alerting, on-call rotations, etc.). All of this is done using the company’s Cortex Query Language (CQL).

Cortex pulls in data from about 30 commonly used tools like GitHub, Bitbucket, Datadog, GitLab, Jira, SignalFX and your Kubernetes clusters.

“What’s really impressive about Cortex is it works from both top-down as well as bottom-up,” Sequoia partner and Cortex board member Bogomil Balkansky explained. “It has a very strong value proposition for both engineering leaders and engineering executives in the sense of giving them a great framework for how to set expectations and standards across organizations — and how to say, ‘hey, every service in our organization needs to do X, Y and Z, needs to be upgraded to the latest version Node.js, needs to have these and these things — and then being able to track what percentage complies with all we call expectations. But it also helps individual engineers and individual teams keep track of their own work.”

With today’s announcement, the company is also launching its Service Creation tool, which gives developers a basic scaffold for new services based on their own templates. In a way, that’s a logical next step for the company. There’s no better way to help teams improve the consistency of their microservices practices than by automating them, after all.

Also new with today’s release are new teams features to help improve cross-team collaboration and developer onboarding.

“As Salesforce did for sales, Marketo did for marketing and ServiceNow did for IT, Cortex now does for engineering,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global. “Cortex helps teams set best practices and guidelines for development, making it easy for engineering, SRE, security and DevOps to work together to create higher quality services. Cortex orchestrates a culture change where engineering organizations become proactive in their approach to software quality and are resilient to the inevitable and constant changes that come with building software.”

Cortex snags $2.25M seed to build services catalog for development teams

Posted on

Splunk acquires Plumbr and Rigor to build out its observability platform

Data platform Splunk today announced that it has acquired two startups, Plumbr and Rigor, to build out its new Observability Suite, which is also launching today. Plumbr is an application performance monitoring service, while Rigor focuses on digital experience monitoring, using synthetic monitoring and optimization tools to help businesses optimize their end-user experiences. Both of these acquisitions complement the technology and expertise Splunk acquired when it bought SignalFx for over $1 billion last year.

Splunk did not disclose the price of these acquisitions, but Estonia-based Plumbr had raised about $1.8 million, while Atlanta-based Rigor raised a debt round earlier this year.

When Splunk acquired SignalFx, it said it did so in order to become a leader in observability and APM. As Splunk CTO Tim Tully told me, the idea here now is to accelerate this process.

Image Credits: Splunk

“Because a lot of our users and our customers are moving to the cloud really, really quickly, the way that they monitor [their] applications changed because they’ve gone to serverless and microservices a ton,” he said. “So we entered that space with those acquisitions, we quickly folded them together with these next two acquisitions. What Plumbr and Rigor do is really fill out more of the portfolio.”

He noted that Splunk was especially interested in Plumbr’s bytecode implementation and its real-user monitoring capabilities, and Rigor’s synthetics capabilities around digital experience monitoring (DEM). “By filling in those two pieces of the portfolio, it gives us a really amazing set of solutions because DEM was the missing piece for our APM strategy,” Tully explained.

Image Credits: Splunk

With the launch of its Observability Suite, Splunk is now pulling together a lot of these capabilities into a single product — which also features a new design that makes it stand apart from the rest of Splunk’s tools. It combines logs, metrics, traces, digital experience, user monitoring, synthetics and more.

“At Yelp, our engineers are responsible for hundreds of different microservices, all aimed at helping people find and connect with great local businesses,” said Chris Gordon, Technical Lead at Yelp, where his team has been testing the new suite. “Our Production Observability team collaborates with Engineering to improve visibility into the performance of key services and infrastructure. Splunk gives us the tools to empower engineers to monitor their own services as they rapidly ship code, while also providing the observability team centralized control and visibility over usage to ensure we’re using our monitoring resources as efficiently as possible.”

Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B

Posted on

Splunk acquires Plumbr and Rigor to build out its observability platform

Data platform Splunk today announced that it has acquired two startups, Plumbr and Rigor, to build out its new Observability Suite, which is also launching today. Plumbr is an application performance monitoring service, while Rigor focuses on digital experience monitoring, using synthetic monitoring and optimization tools to help businesses optimize their end-user experiences. Both of these acquisitions complement the technology and expertise Splunk acquired when it bought SignalFx for over $1 billion last year.

Splunk did not disclose the price of these acquisitions, but Estonia-based Plumbr had raised about $1.8 million, while Atlanta-based Rigor raised a debt round earlier this year.

When Splunk acquired SignalFx, it said it did so in order to become a leader in observability and APM. As Splunk CTO Tim Tully told me, the idea here now is to accelerate this process.

Image Credits: Splunk

“Because a lot of our users and our customers are moving to the cloud really, really quickly, the way that they monitor [their] applications changed because they’ve gone to serverless and microservices a ton,” he said. “So we entered that space with those acquisitions, we quickly folded them together with these next two acquisitions. What Plumbr and Rigor do is really fill out more of the portfolio.”

He noted that Splunk was especially interested in Plumbr’s bytecode implementation and its real-user monitoring capabilities, and Rigor’s synthetics capabilities around digital experience monitoring (DEM). “By filling in those two pieces of the portfolio, it gives us a really amazing set of solutions because DEM was the missing piece for our APM strategy,” Tully explained.

Image Credits: Splunk

With the launch of its Observability Suite, Splunk is now pulling together a lot of these capabilities into a single product — which also features a new design that makes it stand apart from the rest of Splunk’s tools. It combines logs, metrics, traces, digital experience, user monitoring, synthetics and more.

“At Yelp, our engineers are responsible for hundreds of different microservices, all aimed at helping people find and connect with great local businesses,” said Chris Gordon, Technical Lead at Yelp, where his team has been testing the new suite. “Our Production Observability team collaborates with Engineering to improve visibility into the performance of key services and infrastructure. Splunk gives us the tools to empower engineers to monitor their own services as they rapidly ship code, while also providing the observability team centralized control and visibility over usage to ensure we’re using our monitoring resources as efficiently as possible.”

Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B

Posted on

Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B

Splunk, the publicly traded data processing and analytics company, today announced that it has acquired SignalFx for a total price of about $1.05 billion. Approximately 60 percent of this will be in cash and 40 percent in Splunk common stock.

SignalFx, which emerged from stealth in 2015, provides real-time cloud monitoring solutions, predictive analytics and more. Upon close, Splunk argues, this acquisition will allow it to become a leader in “in observability and APM for organizations at every stage of their cloud journey, from cloud-native apps to homegrown on-premises applications.”

Indeed, the acquisition will likely make Splunk a far stronger player in the cloud space as it expands its support for cloud-native applications and the modern infrastructures and architectures those rely on.

Ahead of the acquisition, SignalFx had raised a total of $178.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors include General Catalyst, Tiger Global Management, Andreessen Horowitz and CRV. Its customers include the likes of AthenaHealth, Change.org, Kayak, NBCUniversal, and Yelp.

2019 08 21 1332

“Data fuels the modern business, and the acquisition of SignalFx squarely puts Splunk in position as a leader in monitoring and observability at massive scale,” said Doug Merritt, President and CEO, Splunk, in today’s announcement. “SignalFx will support our continued commitment to giving customers one platform that can monitor the entire enterprise application lifecycle. We are also incredibly impressed by the SignalFx team and leadership, whose expertise and professionalism are a strong addition to the Splunk family.”