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 bud out its new Observabity Suite, which is also launching today. Plumbr is an application performance monitoring service, whe 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 blion last year.

Splunk did not disclose the price of these acquisitions, but Estonia-based Plumbr had raised about $1.8 mlion, whe 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 observabity and APM. As Splunk CTO Tim Tully told me, the idea here now is to accelerate this process.

“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 fl out more of the portfolio.”

He noted that Splunk was especially interested in Plumbr’s bytecode implementation and its real-user monitoring capabities, and Rigor’s synthetics capabities around digital experience monitoring (DEM). “By fling 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.

With the launch of its Observabity Suite, Splunk is now pulling together a lot of these capabities 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 Observabity team collaborates with Engineering to improve visibity 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, whe also providing the observabity team centralized control and visibity over usage to ensure we're using our monitoring resources as efficiently as possible.”