Apica integrates complex data management capabilities to enhance application observability – SiliconANGLE

Application monitoring and data management startup Apica AB has finally delivered on the integrations it promised following its recent acquisitions of Logiq.ai LLC and Circonus Inc.

The company said today that its newly enhanced products will provide deeper insights into data management and make it easier for customers to benefit from them. The revamped Apica Ascent 2.0 platform comes as the company announced it has closed on a $16 million funding round, saying it will use the money to expand the office of its chief technology officer and add to its engineering, research and product development teams.

Apica is a fast-growing player in the highly competitive application monitoring market, where it competes against companies such as Datadog Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.’s Splunk. The Apica Ascent platform offers a suite of load testing and web performance monitoring tools that companies can use to optimize the performance of their cloud- and mobile-based applications.

Ten months ago, Apica acquired the enterprise data fabric-as-a-service startup Logiq.ai, which had built a platform for harnessing operational data and analyzing it to support production operations, cybersecurity and compliance. The software unifies, integrates and connects observability data so it can be analyzed more easily.

As for Circonus, Apica snapped it up at the end of February, describing it as a pioneer in the data observability realm. Circonus’s tools are said to help with the monitoring and analysis of large volumes of telemetry data, such as logs, metrics and traces that are gathered from remote sources. They consist of multiple layers, with agents for data collection, a data ingestion pipeline, stream alerting tools and an analytics dashboard.

The good news for Apica customers is that the capabilities of both companies have now been integrated with Apica Ascent. Version 2.0 of Apica Ascent is said to be the outcome of the company’s strategic approach of looking at data management as a “fundamental problem that underlies the challenges of dealing with machine and operational data,” the company explained.

Though the original Apica 1.0 was mostly focused on monitoring applications, the company said customers’ needs have adapted to data management problems, and that is precisely what it wants to fix now. The company believes observability is fundamentally a problem of data management, and to get to grips with it, customers must have tools in place for data transformation and cleansing.

That’s why the updated platform does more than just monitor application performance. Now, it gathers and organizes data around network performance, metrics for compute, storage and file systems, and telemetry data to provide a much more comprehensive overview of customer’s runtime applications.

Apica Chief Technology and Product Officer Ranjan Parthasarathy said the company aims to be flexible enough that it can meet enterprise customers exactly where they are. “Organizations struggle to manage tool sprawl, so we’ve provided the platform that ensures their legacy and digital transformation strategies work well together,” he said. “They don’t have to leave their legacy tools behind while modernizing – Apica can help make everything work together to provide insights needed for the business.”

According to Parthasarathy, there is a lot more to come for Apica, which is determined to support new workloads such as generative artificial intelligence, which will create yet more mountains of data that need to be observed.

“Apica embraces anything and everything to support ecosystem connectors, enabling open protocols and data collectors to be available in the open ecosystem, and we’re not done yet,” he said. “We continue to work towards open source to provide the most extensive coverage and help customers control their data better.”

Parthasarathy dropped by SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile event livestreaming studio theCUBE, during its coverage of the Boomi World event last month. He appeared alongside Boomi Inc.’s EMEA Chief Technology Officer Ann Maya, to present the Apica/Boomi partnership as a case study for the integration of data management and AI to enhance observability operations:

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