I’ve often written about the fact that modern applications are fundamentally different from those that came before – themes of larger scale, wider distribution and an iterative approach abound. Clearly monitoring and management solutions that are tasked with controlling these applications need to work different from solutions for legacy applications. But with that as a given, it becomes time to look at what extra value modern solutions can deliver to application owners.
Monitoring vendor ExtraHop aims to deliver on this extra value, indeed they don’t even describe themselves as a monitoring solution, rather they’re a vendor of real-time wire data analytics. While that sounds a little buzz-word fuelled, the idea that ExtraHop is trying to socialize is that a modern monitoring platform should actually be about operational intelligence. An appliance-based solution, ExtraHop deliver correlated, cross-tier visibility for the dynamic IT environment of today. So what of this extra value? The platform covers a broad range of functionality, including:
- Visualizations (dashboards and geomaps)
- Trending and alerts
- Programmable metrics
- Wire data and analytics generated from those data
This last offering is perhaps the most interesting – by capturing transmission on the wire, 24*7, ExtraHop has a deep visibility not only of the application performance, but also of the actual data that is being transmitted. The platform can then capture insights of value to IT – say IT wants to know what data is encrypted on the wire, ExtraHop can capture that. Want some analysis of HeartBleed issues? Users can set the platform to deliver them insights into location of requests, originating IP addresses etc. It’s kind of like old-world monitoring meets predictive analytics and its an interesting glimpse into the future.
So interesting that ExtraHop has managed to score a $41M series C funding round led by Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV). TCV is the firm that funded interesting vendors in peripheral spaces such as RealNetworks, Splunk and RiskMetrics. Existing investors Meritech Capital Partners and Madrona Venture Group also participated in the round. This brings ExtraHop’s total funding to date to $61.6M – a princely sum but one that will come in handy if the company is to be successful creating a new category, as it aims to. Its term of IT Operations Analytics is actually a good descriptor for what is going on here. Whether or not the term will stick is something that only time can tell.
Of course a number of other vendors do distributed monitoring, and there are no end of logging vendors (Loggly, SumoLogic etc) stepping up to offer analytic insights. But combining those two worlds into one package is certainly an interesting play. ExtraHop has seen broad adoption – including verticals such as healthcare, ecommerce, financial services and, of course, software companies. The company boasts of such blue chip customers as Lockheed Martin, Morgan Stanley and McKesson.
The space is busy and exciting – it is going to be an interesting couple of years watching all these different vendors jockeying for position.
