Virtual Instruments Acquires Metricly, Expanding Public Cloud Reach

The infrastructure and workload management vendor, a player in the emerging AIOps category, looks to become a full-fledged hybrid solution with the deal for a public cloud monitoring specialist

Virtual Instruments, a startup that's seen several transformations over the last decade, will enter a new phase with the acquisition of Metricly that extends its solutions deep into the public cloud.

The San Jose, Calif.-based infrastructure management vendor said Wednesday the deal for Reston, Va.-based Metricly will introduce a set of complementary technologies that expand capabilities in optimizing performance, cost, capacity and availability across hybrid environments.

"Metricly adds to every component of our portfolio," said Tim Van Ash, Virtual Instrument's senior vice president of products. The company offers a "natural and synergistic fit that gives us ability to manage the multi-cloud, regardless of where the customer is deployed." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

[Related: Virtual Instruments Overhauls Partner Program, Increases Channel Discounts By 10 Percent]

Virtual Instruments has evolved since its founding in 2008 from focusing on storage performance to application performance to becoming an important player in the rapidly emerging AIOps category.

Metricly delivers "a dramatic expansion in the number of items we can monitor," Van Ash said. The acquired company's cloud-based platform enables IT teams to receive custom metrics for greater visibility into middleware, public cloud services, containers and Kubernetes.

After some bumps along the road, and then a shakeup in 2016 that saw the departure of CEO John Thompson, the chairman of Microsoft's board, Virtual Instruments shifted to developing application-centric infrastructure management solutions.

The startup looks to enable customers "to understand how infrastructure and applications perform together," Van Ash said, and optimize that functionality.

That strategy has led the company into AIOps, a new approach to managing infrastructure that applies machine learning and deep analytics to discover issues before they cause problems and enable predictive capacity management.

That technology is delivered through VirtualWisdom, an AI-enabled platform for infrastructure management and optimization.

The company also offers WorkloadWisdom, which optimizes storage systems for specific workloads by helping customers rebalance workloads and resize resources.

But "what we've been hearing from customers is the need to manage cloud within the cloud," Van Ash said.

Metricly delivers advanced capabilities in that realm, ensuring Virtual Instruments will deliver a consistent platform from the cloud to the data center.

It’s the lack of consistent tools that lead operations teams "to drop the ball," he said, by making it difficult to spot lapses in performance and availability across complex, heterogenous environments.

Metricly emerged out of a company called Netuitive, an early adopter in applying machine learning to IT operations.

It delivers advanced anomaly detection capabilities, visibility into nearly all cloud environments, and unique analytics and visualization tools, he said.

It's not the first time Virtual Instruments has broadened its capabilities through acquisitions.

The company merged with Load DynamiX in 2016, a startup it competed with in the storage performance analytics market. Later that year Virtual Instruments acquired Xangati, which specialized in the networking side of virtualization performance management.

Metricly CEO Bob Farzami told CRN has company and Virtual Instruments had similar visions for applying analytics to optimizing complex IT infrastructure.

"Our focus in the last few years has been in public cloud, theirs in private cloud, so together we offer and bring the hybrid cloud solution to partners and customers," Farzami said. "The synergy is clear from that perspective."

Both companies also have similar partner bases, from MSPs providing services using their solutions to traditional VARs reselling those products to enterprises, Van Ash said.

Metricly will help Virtual Instruments forge relationships with large systems integrators focused on moving customers to the cloud, whether through lift-and-shift processes or rearchitecting traditional apps, Van Ash said.

"With Metricly, we now bring to customers a platform that provides comprehensive management of those workloads once they're in the cloud," he said.

Metricly also offers an attractive go-to-market feature that Virtual Instruments might eventually adopt—the ability for MSPs to white-label the platform, he added.

"That's a new dimension to our platform that we will be looking to build off and expand on," he said.