When it was first founded, Datadog was just an infrastructure monitoring service. True, they were a service that was built for a new, cloud-first, way of working, but infrastructure was their sole focus. It was natural enough, therefore, that Datadog and New Relic, a company more focused on application monitoring, should partner to offer customers a more complete solution. But then both companies went into each others territory, with New Relic developing infrastructure monitoring, and Datadog going into application monitoring. The happy partnership was no longer.

Today we see the next stage in that process with the announcement that Datadog is acquiring Paris-based log-management company Logmatic.io. This last piece of the puzzle, log-management, completes the trifecta of specific functional areas a modern management company needs to offer, and also casts a shadow over some other partnerships, in particular one with Splunk, a company that started out as a log management and analysis player, but more recently moved into the monitoring side of things.

Datadog isn’t mincing words and is being honest about the fact that with this acquisition, they are directly taking on Splunk. They’re also saying that they are the first company to bring all three major categories of monitoring – infrastructure, application and log – into a single platform. Clichés like a “single pane of glass” or a “common monitoring fabric” get bandied around and, to be fair, they’re justified.

Who is Logmatic?

Logmatic.io was founded in 2014 by Emmanuel Gueidan, Renaud Boutet, and Amirhossein Malekzadeh with the aim to help organizations improve their software and business performance. The platform analyzes billions of data points daily with log management and visualization tools and counts brands such as Accenture, BlaBlaCar, Canal+, DailyMotion, and LVMH amongst its customers. Logmatic has raised a reported $1 Million from angel and seed investors.

Logmatic competes directly with Splunk, obviously (although it is a far smaller vendor) but also with SumoLogic, Loggly, Solarwinds and many others. The Logmatic.io team has already joined the Datadog Paris R&D office and an integrated log management solution is currently available to select customers. All current Logmatic.io customers will continue to have access to their existing services and will have a direct path for migration upon the general availability of log management within Datadog.

1+1+1 = better together

Application monitoring. Infrastructure monitoring. Log monitoring. Three parts of a puzzle that really should be thought of a s a whole. While more traditional organizations may have separated these three functions, the reality is that in a more modern agile enterprise (i.e. those who embrace DevOps) these three areas sit side by side – buying them from a single vendor makes total sense. As Olivier Pomel, Chief Executive Officer of Datadog points out:

Integrating logs with the APM and Infrastructure monitoring we already provide is an important step in the evolution of the monitoring and analytics category. Our new integrated platform will simplify the monitoring of modern applications that often span clouds, containers, IoTs and mobile devices. It will also unlock new A.I. and machine learning based capabilities to help customers manage and improve their applications and businesses.”

While vendors will always talk up the synergies, this is a viewpoint that is borne out by real-world customers. As Sylvain Barré, Vice President of Scale at Dailymotion says

We’re already customers of both Datadog and Logmatic.io. Having a single analytics, monitoring, and alerting platform will dramatically improve our productivity.

MyPOV

What’s not to like? I’ve predicted for years that these three areas would come together and we’ve seen this happen with the moves by the various vendors. Whether Datadog is really the first to offer the triumvirate is kind of a moot point – more important is that they’re doing something that customers are asking for. The next move is up to New Relic and Splunk, I guess.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.