ScienceLogic Acquires AppFirst, Will Integrate Application Visibility Into Its Cloud Monitoring Platform

Hybrid cloud monitoring and management specialist ScienceLogic said Thursday that it completed its first-ever acquisition last week, purchasing AppFirst, an application monitoring software developer based in Bloomington, Minn.

Once integrated into the ScienceLogic platform, the AppFirst technology will add, as a native capability, granular and near real-time visibility into application performance, dependencies, and log analytics, closing a gap in ScienceLogic's current technology, said ScienceLogic Chief Operating Officer Mike Denning.

The two companies had partnered for a couple years, with ScienceLogic delivering AppFirst's technology as one of its extendible PowerPacks. The price and financial structure of the deal weren't disclosed.

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"When we were thinking about how we were going to move up the stack into application-centric monitoring, AppFirst really stood out based on a couple unique monitoring capabilities," Denning told CRN.

One attractive technological feature was an agent-based architecture that doesn't impact the applications it monitors.

"AppFirst helped us experiment with the technology," Denning said. "And their SaaS offering enabled us to see the value-add that was a pretty frequent customer request."

ScienceLogic has been rapidly growing over the last year and now has 25,000 customers. Many are using the platform to monitor hybrid cloud assets—data storage, networking, resource utilization—but are increasingly interested in having visibility at the application level in those hybrid environments.

The acquisition comes several months after ScienceLogic, based in Reston, Va., introduced its first channel program as part of a push to bring VARs into its partner community, which then largely consisted of managed service providers. Some of those MSPs had customers that wanted to implement ScienceLogic on-premise in their data centers and the idea behind the VAR program was to give them a way to do that. It also opened ScienceLogic's partner community to better serve the $25 billion hybrid IT market.

"From a channel perspective, every time we add a new endpoint or another log source to monitor, it means more revenue to the partner," Denning said. "New data sources and new sources of visibility give them the opportunity to go back to their customer base and upsell that technology."