Latest acquisition will round out Splunk’s Observability portfolio.
Splunk, an IT monitoring and analytics provider, announced this week that it plans to buy Flowmill. The acquisition target is a California startup with a software platform that helps enterprises gain better visibility into their networks.
Based in Palo Alto, Flowmill bills itself as a cloud network observability company with expertise in network performance monitoring (NPM). It’s offering is based around providing real-time observability into network behavior and performance of distributed cloud applications. It does this through leveraging extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technologies. eBPF is a component of the Linux kernel.
Leveraging Linux for faster identification of issues
The Flowmill platform uses eBPF to match packets to systems and applications. This makes it possible to deploy code directly into the operating system kernel to collect low-level activity data about the applications running on top. It’s this low-level application activity data that enables Flowmill’s platform to identify which specific workloads are responsible for networking issues.
The technology’s ability to speed up troubleshooting isn’t the only reason Splunk is buying the startup. Companies can deploy Flowmill’s platform without modifying the applications or network they’re looking to monitor. This eliminates a time-consuming requirement associated with using traditional tools.
Moreover, Flowmill says its platform is useful for reducing networking costs in the public cloud. This is because their solution makes it easier to identify applications that are consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth.
Rounding out Splunk’s Observability offering
The Flowmill acquisition should complement Splunk’s recent acquisitions of Plumbr and Rigor. Splunk says this will give their customers the ability to address every need in the areas of application performance monitoring (APM), digital enterprise monitoring (DEM) and NPM. And it will do this across all types of applications and infrastructures, according to the company.
Splunk plans to fold Flowmill’s technology into its Observability Suite bundle of products for monitoring infrastructure and applications.
The terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. It’s expected to complete by Jan. 31, 2021.
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