Application monitoring and observability startup Apica AB today announced its second acquisition in the space of six months, buying a small telemetry data company called Circonus Inc. for an undisclosed price.

The acquisition was revealed alongside a new funding round led by Riverside Acceleration Capital, with participation from existing investors Industrifonden, SEB Foundation, Oxx and Leo Capital. Once again, the company declined to disclose the amount, but it follows a $10 million funding round announced last August, which coincided with its earlier acquisition of the data fabric startup Logiq.ai LLC.

Apica is an emerging player in the competitive application monitoring market. Its main product offering is the Apica Ascent platform, which provides a suite of load testing and web performance monitoring tools that companies can use to optimize the performance of cloud and mobile applications.

Circonus claims to be a pioneer in the area of data observability, providing tools for monitoring and analyzing large amounts of telemetry data, or information such as logs, metrics and traces that’s gathered from remote sources. Its platform consists of multiple layers, including the Circonus Unified Agent for data collection, a data ingestion pipeline, stream alerting tools and an analytics dashboard that makes it easier to explore and contextualize telemetry data.

Apica Chief Product and Technology Officer Ranjan Parthasarathy told SiliconANGLE that the company is buying Circonus because its tools will help it to achieve its mission of unifying data to improve insights. He pointed out the startup’s proven expertise when it comes to large-scale distributed systems, data science and telemetry data.

“We will integrate the company’s IRONdb and Passport product lines into the Ascent Platform, giving our customers even more capabilities for active observability,” Parthasarathy said. “Our true north is unifying all the many layers of data into a single stream to make better insights.”

According to Parthasarathy, IRONdb is a time-series database that can scale up to more than 1 billion unique time-series metric streams. It was designed to address challenges that exist with traditional time-series databases, which store data in a chronological fashion. Such challenges include scalability, performance and storage efficiency, he said. IRONdb has been specifically architected to solve these problems, he added.

“Its customers run large installations [that generate] hundreds of mullions of time-series data points,” Parthasarathy said. “With IRONdb, those users can ingest other data sources and interoperate with third-party data collection tools and monitoring systems already in place.”

Meanwhile, Passport is used by teams to gain better control over telemetry agents while managing numerous varieties of high-volume telemetry data. It enables something akin to “fleet management” of multiple data collectors, providing centralized visibility into the inventory of data collection agents companies use.

“In a world where downtime is death, solving monitoring and observability in a streamlined and cost-efficient way is critical for businesses,” Parthasarathy explained. “Apica’s fleet management integration, enabled by Passport, will enable the management of diverse types of data collectors, tracking inventory and performing patching and upgrades, bring much-needed configuration drift management and provide elasticity of data collection at the edge.”

Above all else, the acquisition of Circonus will solidify Apica’s position as a trailblazer in data management and observability, said Chief Executive Mathias Thomsen. “Its solutions are well aligned with our roadmap and we will be able to provide our customers with a unified view of their entire technology stack,” he said.

Image: Circonus