Cisco Systems Inc. announced today it will acquire events and logs analytics startup Dashbase Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Dashbase, whose software is used by enterprises to pull in log data from various real-time communications environments, will help bolster Cisco’s AppDynamics platform. AppDynamics is an application monitoring platform that has become central to Cisco’s push in the application observability market since it was bought by the networking giant for $3.7 billion in 2017.

Observability is a fast-growing market in information technology that involves monitoring apps by pulling data from logs, metrics, traces and events so that operators can identify the root cause of any issues that crop up and resolve them quickly.

Linda Tong, general manager of AppDynamics, said in a blog post announcing the acquisition that Dashbase’s technology will help to boost visibility and unify data across multiple domains. In other words, it will help AppDynamics users to access their data more easily “across technology, user and business domains.”

In particular, Dashbase’s tools will help to improve case investigation and issue resolution processes with support for metrics, events, logs and traces. “Dashbase will enable customers to support broader and more highly unique and uncommon data sources across cloud and traditional environments in a scalable, high-performance way, giving them greater insight into performance issues,” Tong said.

AppDynamics in the last couple of years has emerged as a vital piece of Cisco’s portfolio, serving as the foundation of its effort to support enterprises that are steadily shifting their applications toward a multicloud architecture.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that the need for enterprises to make sense of what happens in their computer systems is more important than ever. “There is little doubt that Dashbase will make AppDynamics a more powerful tool for enterprises to gain visibility into application environments, improving experiences on both the customer and the employee side,” he said.

Photo: Cisco