Splunk Acquires Omnition for Improved Observability

Splunk is continuing its acquisition spree by buying Omnition, a stealth-mode company that provides distributed tracing to improve monitoring across microservices applications.

The news comes on the heels of Splunk announcing its plan to spend more than $1 billion in cash and stock to acquire SignalFX, a provider of real-time monitoring and observability for cloud infrastructure and microservices.

Financial details of the Omnition transaction weren’t disclosed. The acquisition is set to close by the end of this month.

Tim Tully, Splunk’s chief technology officer and senior vice president, tells us future integration plans will be announced after the transaction has closed, and the Omnition and Splunk teams have been able to work together on detailed plans, including plans for its partners. 

Splunk’s Tim Tully

“With Omnition, we had an opportunity to bring in an innovative product that complements our existing offerings, giving our customers a single, cutting-edge observability suite with premium distributed tracing capabilities,” he said. “The combined power of Splunk and Omnition will provide users with a leading observability platform, bringing tracing together with logs within one of the most advanced IT monitoring and analytics platform.”

Splunk is always evaluating opportunities where “we can leapfrog our own pace of development,” Tully said. “Building out the features and functionality that Omnition offers would have put us at a disadvantage from a timing perspective.”

Until the acquisition closes, Splunk and Omnition will continue to operate as separate companies, Tully said.

In a blog, Spiros Xanthos, Omnition’s CEO and founder, said his company is in “full alignment with Splunk on our approach to distributed tracing … and our vision of a tightly integrated observability platform that combines traces, metrics and logs.”

“By joining forces we can accelerate this vision and help our customers accelerate their own cloud-native journey,” he said. “Furthermore, we are confident the values and product principles shared by Omnition and Splunk will allow for our team and product to achieve their full potential inside Splunk.”

Splunk has more than 1,700 active partners, up from 1,600 at the midpoint of last year. It unveiled partner program updates earlier this year.