A Third-Party Management Best Practices Checklist Looking to extend the reach of its IT management software into the cloud, SolarWinds this week announced it has acquired Papertrail, a provider of a log analytics application delivered as a service. SolarWinds President and CEO Kevin Thompson says the acquisition of Papertrail for $41 million signals the company’s […]
A Third-Party Management Best Practices Checklist
Looking to extend the reach of its IT management software into the cloud, SolarWinds this week announced it has acquired Papertrail, a provider of a log analytics application delivered as a service.
SolarWinds President and CEO Kevin Thompson says the acquisition of Papertrail for $41 million signals the company’s intention to provide IT management tools that can be applied both inside and out of the cloud.
Currently priced starting at $7 per month, Thompson says that Papertrail is already one of the lowest cost providers of log analytics delivered as a service. Hosted in data centers owned by Equinix, Thompson says one of the primary reasons that Papertrail can be aggressive on pricing is that it owns its own servers in those data centers versus relying on a public cloud service.
Thompson says that log analytics has become critical both for when applications are deployed and being developed. Developers are being asked to meet demanding application performance requirements that demand they have access to detailed log analytics during the application development process, says Thompson. Via application programming interfaces, Thompson says Papertrail can pull data from any piece of IT infrastructure.
Most recently, SolarWinds also acquired Pingdom and Librato to extend its IT management portfolio. In addition, SolarWinds owns N-Able Technologies, a provider of a management platform used widely by providers of managed IT services.
As critical as IT monitoring has become over the years, it’s clear that IT organizations need access to more analytics to pinpoint exactly where an IT problem is occurring. More often than not, fixing that problem takes only a matter of minutes. It’s the hours, days and weeks that IT departments spend looking for the source of the issue that winds up both aggravating end users and destroying IT administrator reputations. Hopefully, with access to more detailed log analytics, the amount of time it takes to discover an issue will not only be less than the time it takes to fix it, but the problem itself will be mitigated long before any end user realizes it exists.
Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.
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