Virtual Instruments buys Metricly to expand cloud performance monitoring capability

Last week I reported that AIOps was a hot topic, albeit with some inherent confusion around terminology and product positioning. This announcement from Virtual Instruments about their purchase of Metricly points to continued development in the space.

Virtual Instruments have moved very quickly from being an on-premises infrastructure performance monitoring company to one with the ability to manage Infrastucture across a wide range of hybrid, multi-cloud environments, as well as traditional legacy systems. For me, their big differentiator has been their focus on capturing machine and wire data “as it passes”. This means it is truly monitoring in real time with an ability to highlight early signs of performance issues, unlike solutions that are based on taking snapshots based on log and event files which are much more about analysing problems that have already occurred.

By buying Metricly, Virtual Instruments is now positioning itself firmly in the Cloud monitoring market space, with a solution that is likely to appeal to cloud native organisations who don’t have the same need to monitor and manage complex hybrid environments in real time, with the additional costs that such an approach entail. This has the potential to significantly increase Virtual Instruments’ ideal target market.

There are two other synergies I think could come from this acquisition. Last year, Virtual Instruments announced a service that built on the huge amounts of empirical data that they capture on the way applications use the underlying infrastructure. This analyses the suitability of applications to be run in the cloud. Metricly have well developed solutions that monitor and manage your cloud costs. Putting the two capabilities together should provide a much more predictable way of transitioning applications to the cloud, and monitoring the outcome, than has been available up to now.

The second area of synergy is the potential to bring a far more granular, real-time approach to cloud performance management if some of the monitoring tools from Metricly can be integrated into the Virtual Wisdom solution. You never, know… we might be getting closer to providing genuine, business service performance SLAs in the Cloud instead of the infrastructure availability SLAs that have tended to be the norm.