Splunk Inc. today announced plans to acquire alerting startup VictorOps Inc. in a move that could help make its popular infrastructure analytics platform an even more central part of information technology teams’ work.

The deal is worth $120 million in cash and securities. This represents a respectable return for VictorOps’ investors, which have bet a total of $33.7 million on the startup since it hit the scene in 2012. Splunk expects to wrap up the acquisition by the end of next month.

Boulder, Colorado-based VictorOps offers a platform that companies can use to automatically notify their IT personnel about technical issues. The software provides the ability to customize the order in which alerts are sent and to whom based on various operational factors, such as which administrator is on call when a problem occurs. Each notification contains technical information about the issue at hand so as to streamline the troubleshooting process.

VictorOps has built up an impressive installed base over the last six years. The list of companies that use the startup’s platform include Snap Inc., Rackspace Technologies Inc. and CA Technologies Inc. to name a few customers.

Splunk plans to combine VictorOps’ alerting features with the infrastructure monitoring capabilities of its namesake platform. This vision builds on the integration that the startup released for joint customers last year. Using the connector, companies can have VictorOps alert administrators when Splunk detects an important event such a server malfunction.

This integration will likely be expanded following the acquisition. Todd Vernon, VictorOps’ founder and chief executive officer, offered a clue as to what customers can expect in a blog post. He hinted that Splunk’s artificial intelligence features might be used to generate more informative alerts for administrators. 

“We look forward to working together to create a ‘Platform of Engagement’ that uses the most actionable information available and correlates monitoring and incident management data to foster shared understanding, speed resolution and leverage AI to recommend solutions,” Vernon wrote.

Under Splunk, VictorOps could become a much bigger force to reckon with for the competing IT alerting providers out there. One of the biggest players in this segment is PagerDuty Inc., a fellow startup that just recently expanded its feature set with new capabilities designed to deliver benefits similar to those Vernon outlined in his blog post.  

Image: Splunk