Elastic N.V. is looking to create a full set of observability capabilities into its enterprise search platform after acquiring a startup called Optimyze Inc. today that specializes in continuous profiling.

Three-year-old Optimyze is a Zurich, Switzerland-based startup that’s best known for its Prodfiler tool. Information technology teams use Prodfiler to monitor resources such as central processing units and memory and gain deep visibility, to the extent they can see how much processor usage each line of code is responsible for.

Elastic is best known for its popular Elasticsearch platform, which enterprises use to store, search and analyze huge volumes of structured and unstructured data in close to real time. Elasticsearch serves as the underlying engine for millions of applications that have more complex features and requirements.

Elastic also offers observability tools for tracking network performance and identifying threats, and it’s this, fast-growing part of its business that will benefit from adding Optimyze’s capabilities.

Continuous profiling is an emerging concept that gives engineers clearer insights into which specific bits of code are the most resource-intensive. With these insights, companies can potentially reduce their cloud computing costs quite significantly, given how most provides charge on a consumption basis.

Optimyze’s most notable rival in the continuous profiling space is probably Datadog Inc., but there are other competitors, such as Granulate Cloud Solutions Ltd.

Shay Banon, Elastic’s founder and chief executive officer, not surprisingly said Optimyze’s tools are some of the best available. “Optimyze overcomes the limitations of traditional profiling techniques to provide whole-system continuous profiling of systems and code, improving developer productivity, accelerating innovation, and delivering rich customer experiences,” he said.

In August, Elastic acquired a couple of startups – the security firm Cmd and Build.Security Ltd. — which give it additional capabilities around observability. In a blog post, Elastic Chief Product Officer Ashutosh Kulkarni said the company is ready to “unify the pillars of observability” which he defines as “metrics, logs and traces” and enable its customers to observe and protect their data through a single platform.

“We intend to integrate Optimyze and Cmd eBPF-related innovations as well as the Open Policy Agent capabilities from build.security into the Elastic Agent to deliver a simple deployment process and a unified approach to data collection for observability and security,” Kulkarni said.

Optimyze CEO Thomas Dullen said continuous profiling by itself is already an extremely useful capability. However, he believes its value increases exponentially when the data it generates is paired with metrics, traces, logs and other operational data.

“Using the analytics and machine learning capabilities of the Elastic Stack, we will make it easier for users to effectively solve performance mysteries, debug production incidents quicker, reduce wasteful computation and ultimately deliver services that will be faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient,” he said.

Elastic said the acquisition will close before the end of the year. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Image: Elastic