ServiceNow Inc. said today. that it plans to acquire a startup called Era Software Inc. to strengthen the capabilities of its Lightstep observability platform.
Once completed, the company said, the acquisition will enable Lightstep to provide unified visibility at scale, with customers benefiting from actionable insights from across their entire information technology landscape. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but ServiceNow said it expects to complete the deal in the fourth quarter of the year.
Era Software is the creator of a robust observability and log management database platform featuring machine learning-powered data indexing and schema-free storage capabilities. It claims to have created a new approach to log data management that solves the scale, performance and cost issues associated with running distributed applications in modern cloud-native architectures.
Log management is the practice of continuously gathering, storing, processing and analyzing data from diverse programs and applications in order to optimize system performance, identify technical issues, better manage resources, strengthen security and improve compliance.
Era automatically indexes every dimension in logs and works with arbitrary data shapes. Interestingly, the platform can adjust to different log data rates dynamically without any fine-tuning. This provides a way to deploy a log management infrastructure that is less complex but still performs well.
ServiceNow said the plan is to combine Era’s capabilities with those of Lightstep, a company it acquired in May 2021 that now forms the basis of its core observability platform. ServiceNow promotes a vision of “unified telemetry” that encompasses logs, metrics and traces. Lightstep is a founding member of the OpenTelemetry project that shaped this vision, which aims to make it easier for DevOps teams and engineers to innovate faster, with greater precision and control.
By combining Era Software and Lightstep, ServiceNow believes it can extend the unified observability workflow and eliminate many of the “confusing context switches” that hinder productivity in DevOps teams and site reliability engineer.
Era Software co-founder and Chief Executive Todd Persen said he built his company to simplify the complex challenge of managing large volumes of observability data, with a particular focus on log management. “We’ve always believed that oversight should span the entire business,” he added.
ServiceNow has made a string of acquisitions over the past 18 months as it looks to add to the capabilities of its flagship Now Platform. In its most recent deal, it acquired skills mapping and intelligence Hitch Works Inc. in June for an undisclosed price. Last year, it acquired startups including DotWalk Inc., Mapwize SAS and Gekkobrain.
“Digital transformation succeeds or fails based on unified observability,” said Ben Sigelman, general manager of ServiceNow’s Lightstep business unit and co-founder of Lightstep. “Together, ServiceNow and Era Software are set up to deliver a unified and seamless monitoring experience within a single solution, designed to scale.”