Cisco Systems Inc. today announced plans to acquire Epsagon Ltd., a startup with a platform that helps enterprises detect technical issues in their applications and identify the root cause.

Financial terms were not disclosed. New York- and Tel Aviv-based Epsagon has raised $30 million in funding from investors that included Lightspeed Venture Partners. The startup says its platform is used by thousands of engineers at companies such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Deloitte Ltd.

There are multiple ways of monitoring an application for technical issues. One of the most widely used approaches is called distributed tracing, which is what Epsagon’s platform uses to find malfunctions.

Modern enterprise applications are usually made up of multiple components. For example, an inventory tracking tool might consist of two modules: one that collects inventory information from a company’s stores and another that organizes the information in a database. The more tasks an application performs, the more components it usually has.

When a technical issue emerges in an application, for example a latency spike, administers have to identify which of the application’s components is causing the malfunction and find a way to fix it. The task often requires significant effort. That’s because if a malfunction occurs in a complex workload made up of dozens or hundreds of individual components, identifying which of them is causing the error can be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. 

Epsagon’s distributed tracing platform promises to ease the task. Distributed tracing is an approach for diagnosing technical issues faster wherein administrators send a piece of data known as a request to a malfunctioning application. The request travels through the application’s components, moving from one to the next as if checking off items on a checklist, and collects data on each component along the way. This data gives administrators the insight they need to identify which part of the workload is causing the malfunction.

Epsagon’s platform automates the process of carrying out distributed tracing to save time. Then, the platform visualizes the data it collects on application malfunctions in a diagram that displays which component is experiencing technical issues. In this way, Epsagon spares administrators the hassle of individually testing each of their application’s components until they find the one responsible for the error.

One feature that likely caught Cisco’s attention is that Epsagon’s platform can troubleshoot issues in Kubernetes-powered workloads. Kubernetes is the go-to framework for managing applications built with software containers.

Applications built with software containers often have a particularly large number of components. That’s because they’re usually designed based on a microservices architecture, an approach wherein a workload is implemented not as a single program but rather a large number of smaller programs running separately. Further complicating troubleshooting is the fact that it’s often difficult to determine if an error was caused by a malfunction in one of the workload’s components or in Kubernetes itself.

Enterprises are increasingly using containers and Kubernetes to build software. As a result, there’s a growing need for tools that can help identify issues in Kubernetes-powered applications. The acquisition of Epsagon will enable Cisco to target that growing market better and also provide it with new capabilities for monitoring other types of workloads.

Through a series of acquisitions made in recent years, Cisco has built out a set of tools that together provide what it calls full-stack observability. Instead of only helping customers diagnose issues in one part of their technology environments, such as their applications, Cisco offers features for monitoring every major component from applications to the underlying infrastructure. The company’s portfolio also includes tools for detecting cybersecurity issues and finding opportunities to reduce workloads’ hardware usage.

Epsagon’s distributed tracing technology will enable Cisco to expand the breadth of its feature set. 

Other players in the observability market have also acquired startups with Kubernetes monitoring software to address their customers’ growing use of containers. Late last year, New Relic Inc. bought Kubernetes monitoring startup Pixie Labs Inc. within two months of its launch. Splunk Inc. made an acquisition in this segment around the same time to bolster its own observability capabilities.

Cisco said the Epsagon team will join its strategy, incubation and applications group when the acquisition closes. 

Photo: Cisco