Splunk signs agreement to acquire NPM company Flowmill

Splunk has announced its intention to acquire network performance monitoring company Flowmill.

Splunk has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Palo-Alto based cloud network observability company, with expertise in network performance monitoring (NPM).

The acquisition is expected to close during Splunk's fiscal fourth quarter, subject to customary closing conditions.

With this acquisition, Splunk will continue to work towards its vision of offering a comprehensive Observability Suite.

With Flowmill, Splunk plans to further expands its existing observability capabilities, giving customers the ability to ingest, analyse and take action on additional cloud network and infrastructure data to quickly resolve network-related issues, optimise network performance and reduce network costs, the company states.

According to Splunk, Flowmill will complement the company's recent acquisitions of Plumbr and Rigor, giving customers the ability to address every application performance monitoring (APM), digital enterprise monitoring (DEM) and NPM need across all types of applications and infrastructures.

According to Splunk, extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technologies is a valuable, underutilised data source that is encountered in all cloud-native use cases and much easier to access than traditional networking data.

eBPF is a critical component for full-stack observability, Splunk states.

It enables broad visibility into interactions between applications, networks and other infrastructure elements.

In order to leverage eBPF, systems must be equipped to efficiently collect, integrate, and store high data volumes produced by a large distribution system.

Splunk chief technology officer Tim Tully says, "Observability technology is rapidly increasing in both sophistication and ability to help organisations revolutionise how they monitor their infrastructure and applications.

"Flowmill's innovative NPM solution provides real-time observability into network behavior and performance of distributed cloud applications, leveraging extended Berkeley Packet Filter technologies."

He says, "We're excited to bring Flowmill's visionary NPM technology into our Observability Suite as Splunk continues to deliver best-in-class observability capabilities to our customers.

Flowmill founder and CEO Jonathan Perry says, "Flowmill's approach to building systems that support full-fidelity, real-time, high-cardinality ingestions and analysis aligns well with Splunk's vision for observability.

Perry says, " We're thrilled to join Splunk and bring eBPF, next-generation NPM to the Splunk Observability Suite.

As a self-proclaimed data for everything company, Splunk produces software for searching, monitoring, and analysing machine-generated big data via a Web-style interface.

Splunk's flagship product captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualisations.

It is a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and web analytics.