Splunk Buys Flowmill

November 24, 2020

Splunk has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Flowmill, a 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 deliver on its vision to offer the world’s most comprehensive Observability Suite. With Flowmill, Splunk further expands its existing observability capabilities, giving customers the ability to ingest, analyze and take action on additional cloud network and infrastructure data to quickly resolve network-related issues, optimize network performance and reduce network costs.

“Observability technology is rapidly increasing in both sophistication and ability to help organizations revolutionize 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 (eBPF) technologies,” said Tim Tully, chief technology officer, Splunk. “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.”

eBPF is a valuable, underutilized 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. 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.

“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,” said Jonathan Perry, founder and CEO, Flowmill. “We’re thrilled to join Splunk and bring eBPF, next-generation NPM to the Splunk Observability Suite.”

Flowmill will complement Splunk’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.