Splunk makes third acquisition of 2020

The acquisitive vendor has bought local data monitoring start-up Flowmill to expand its recently unveiled Observability Suite

Splunk has hit the M&A trail again with its latest acquisition of a cloud network observability specialist Flowmill.

The acquisitive US-based monitoring and analytics vendor says its sees strengthening its observability software capabilities as a "core" priority for its future growth.

"With this acquisition, Splunk will continue to deliver on its vision to offer the world's most comprehensive Observability Suite," Splunk CTO Tim Tully said.

"Observability technology is rapidly increasing in both sophistication and ability to help organizations revolutionise how they monitor their infrastructure and applications."

HQ in Palo Alto, Flowmill's NPM solution provides real-time oversight into networks and the performance of distributed cloud applications.

Tully said what attracted Splunk to Flowmill is its "innovative approach" to cloud network performance monitoring.

"Flowmill leverages extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technologies…A valuable, underutilised data source that is encountered in all cloud-native use cases and much easier to access than traditional networking data."

Splunk previous two buys this year have also been geared towards strengthening the vendor's Observability Technology Suite.

Last month, Splunk announced it had bought Estonia-HQ application performance monitoring (APM) developer Plumbr, and Rigor, a US provider of digital experience monitoring software.

Splunk unveiled its Observability Suite, a line of monitoring software for IT operations and DevOps teams last month, which the company now calls "one of its core businesses".

The company expects to complete its Flowmill acquisition by the end of its fiscal Q4 2021 in January.