Digital workflow technology developer ServiceNow’s Lightstep observability business has signed an agreement to acquire Era Software, a provider of log management technology that ServiceNow hopes will help strengthen its observability capabilities.
Once the acquisition closes, Era Software will become part of Lightstep. ServiceNow in 2021 acquired Lightstep, a developer of next-generation application monitoring and observability tools that DevOps engineers use to build, deploy, operate and monitor cloud-native applications.
“Lightstep was acquired by ServiceNow last summer,” Ben Sigelman, Lightstep co-founder and general manager of ServiceNow, told CRN US. “And now it’s getting Era Software.”
Observability is a way to look at the outputs of an application to understand its internal state and from there see how to troubleshoot it.
Lightstep is focused on helping businesses simplify observability, Sigelman said.
“Large enterprises are concerned about the number of tools they use and about fragmented and siled tools,” he said. “And log management is very fragmented. Era [Software] is the log management expert. With this acquisition, we create something better than the sum of the parts. Lightstep’s long-term vision is to become a unified surveillance solution.”
Era Software is committed to storing and retrieving logs at scale, said Todd Persen, co-founder and CEO of Era Software.
“We’re taking the focus we have and putting it together with Lightstep into a unified whole,” Persen said.
ServiceNow’s Lightstep business unit has been collecting log data for years, but customers are really looking for dedicated log management capabilities, and its technology is designed to be cloud-native, Sigelman said.
This is important because the amount of log data generated by the cloud is an order of magnitude greater than when generated on-premises, and Era Software gives Lightstep a huge shortcut to address customers’ key use cases , he said.
“For us to offer that kind of log management on our own would take years,” he said. “Lightstep supports log data but it doesn’t check all the boxes for managing that data. We plan to build a unified solution up and down the stack.”
Once the acquisition closes, the first goal is to integrate Era Software into Lightstep and make it available to Lightstep customers next year, Persen said.
“Besides, Era is many things [Software] has not had the opportunity to do in the past but can be done as part of a larger platform,” he said. “We have a ton of engineers, and with Lightstep those things can be done. We really want to build a best-of-breed platform so that observability can do what it was designed to do: make sure people have less work in management.
Sigelman declined to discuss the dollar amount of the acquisition.
This article originally appeared on crn.com