UPDATED 13:46 EDT / APRIL 12 2017

CLOUD

VMware buys Sequoia-backed monitoring startup Wavefront

Less than a year after acquiring a partner called Arkin Net Inc. to bolster its network monitoring capabilities, VMware Inc. has made another strategic purchase in infrastructure tracking.

The virtualization giant today announced that it’s buying Wavefront Inc., a four-year-old startup that focuses on helping companies gain insight into their cloud applications. It has picked up customers such as Lyft Inc., Box Inc. and  Groupon Inc. since hitting the scene in 2013, along with about $65 million in funding. One of its main backers is venture giant Sequoia Capital.

VMware didn’t say how much it’s paying for Wavefront, but the price tag is likely at least in the eight figures given the amount of money that investors have put in and the strategic significance of its technology. The startup offers a monitoring service that can collect “millions” of data points about a cloud application every second to provide a real-time view of operations. Users can have Wavefront generate an alert whenever something unexpected happens, or manually examine the information using a built-in query language to identify long-term problem patterns.

One of the ways the startup set itself apart from the numerous other monitoring providers out there is by putting a strong emphasis on reliability. Wavefront keeps copies of user data at four different locations to ensure that the information remains available at all times, while customers with more advanced needs can choose to host their deployment on dedicated gear. The startup included these features to court large enterprises with high operational standards, which is also the group that VMware hopes to target.

The virtualization giant said that Wavefront will continued to be sold as a standalone service once the acquisition is completed. VMware plans to sell the offering alongside its existing monitoring software, vRealize Log Insight, which is designed for analyzing structured operational data from traditional applications.

The acquisition of Wavefront is the latest in a series of steps that the company has taken to target cloud workloads. Previously, VMware introduced a specialized version of its on-premise virtualization software optimized to run beyond the corporate firewall. The platform works with IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services and VMware’s own vCloud Air.

Image: Pixabay

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