Virtual Instruments Buys Metricly to Marry IT Ops in the Data Center to DevOps in the Cloud

Virtual Instruments has acquired cloud management software maker Metricly, strengthening its efforts to build a comprehensive set of AI-powered tools for monitoring and managing enterprise hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Metricly, formerly known as Netuitive, is a cloud-based service provider that uses machine-learning algorithms to analyze workloads in public cloud environments and enable users to proactively manage performance and optimize costs.

Virtual Instruments executives, who announced the acquisition Wednesday, said the companies are a perfect match because their technologies complement each other. Virtual Instruments’ AI-powered VirtualWisdom software, sold for on-premises deployments, allows companies to monitor and manage health and performance of their in-house IT infrastructure, such as servers, storage, and networks.

Virtual Instruments, based in San Jose, California, began to add cloud monitoring to its product last October, but the Metricly deal bolsters its cloud toolset with much broader capabilities. The two companies did not disclose financial details of the transaction.

“By bringing the pieces together, we give enterprises a consistent platform to manage the infrastructure end-to-end across hybrid applications,” Tim Van Ash, Virtual Instruments senior VP of products, said. “They can manage across server and storage resources, and cloud resources too.”

451 Research senior analyst Nancy Gohring said the Metricly acquisition is an important move for Virtual Instruments as enterprise customers increasingly migrate to a hybrid cloud architecture and need integrated tools to monitor and proactively manage their internal data centers, private clouds, and public cloud environments.

Virtual Instrument competes against infrastructure monitoring tools vendors like LogicMonitor, ScienceLogic, and Zenoss, and they are all looking to add cloud monitoring to their portfolios, Gohring said. On the other end of the spectrum, cloud-native companies like DataDog, which is a cloud monitoring-as-a-service provider, are trying to beef up their on-premises data center monitoring tools, she said.

“It’s clear the future is hybrid. For their customers, it’s easier to have one tool to show what’s going on in their environment,” she said.

Virtual Instruments executives said the company competes in the emerging “AIOps” (Artificial Intelligence for IT operations) market, a phrase coined by Gartner, which defines it as the use of “Big Data, modern machine learning or other advanced analytics technologies to… enhance IT operations functions with proactive, personal and dynamic insight.”

In a recent blog post, Gartner predicted that large enterprises that use AIOps and digital experience monitoring tools to monitor applications and infrastructure will increase from 5 percent in 2018 to 30 percent by 2023.

Virtual Instruments plans to integrate Metricly’s cloud-native monitoring and cost optimization software with its VirtualWisdom technology, providing customers with a single user interface for managing their infrastructure.

Metricly provides visibility into application middleware, containers, and microservices in the public cloud. While its technology is currently optimized for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, it also supports Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, and Alibaba cloud services, Van Ash said.

“One thing we’ve been seeing is the need to bridge IT operations in the data center with DevOps in the cloud, and by integrating Virtual Instruments and Metricly, that will give us the platform that allows for seamless operations between the two groups,” he said.