Five & a half years is a long time in the monitoring space. When we started, Nagios dominated the market, Containers and Kubernetes were on the horizon but not really adopted anywhere, as were microservices. Since then the entire industry has changed, and all those new technologies and the new architectures they enable have been adopted broadly across any company that takes digital services seriously for the future of their business.
We’re proud to have played our part in that shift, working with some of the worlds leading online businesses along the way such as Netflix, BBC Studios, Salesforce.com, Moz, Tune, Dubber and 100’s of others running 1000’s of servers in production, providing the critical monitoring and visibility they required as they moved into this new world. We became deep experts in how to scale and run analytics across billions of timeseries for our customers, to address the exponential increase in metrics coming from these new environments, and built the only monitoring platform in the world, that can be deployed self-service out of the box, democratizing monitoring across teams, so they can collaborate to build better digital services for their users.
Along the way we’ve also founded and run the world’s largest monthly DevOps meetup group running in London and San Francisco, DevOps Exchange, to spread the message and teach practitioners the latest best practices in our industry.
We’ve come along way, but the entire industry has changed in that time. Monitoring has evolved from the #monitoringsucks movement in 2011 to #monitoringoverload in 2019 as loads of vendors, including ourselves, saw the vast shift and opportunity to redesign monitoring for the new architectures and technologies that were coming. We’ve seen a commoditization of the space, with even our most significant competitors losing some of their largest customers to new and improved open-source solutions like Prometheus, which has quickly come to dominate the monitoring landscape. What was once a big blue ocean, is now a big red ocean of monitoring tools to solve every whim you can imagine.
So with that in mind, we decided to sell Outlyer last year, and after speaking to loads of amazing and interested parties, we found our fit and brethren with another European start-up, Bitrise, who are taking off fast in their own wide-open blue ocean, mobile continuous integration/deployments, and have bold plans to provide a complete DevOps platform for mobile developers, which inevitably requires a monitoring platform.
With our deep expertise and extremely scalable and robust technology in this area, Bitrise will accelerate their plans to add monitoring to their platform, and Outlyer will continue to support even more DevOps teams around the world with our expertise and technology.
The entire team are joining Bitrise, as will all our customers who will continue to be supported on the Outlyer platform for the next 6 months while the team work on a new version more aligned to mobile developers and the future of Bitrise’s vision.
Its been an exciting journey and we’re all very proud of the part we’ve played in our industry and are excited about the future the team will have as part of Bitrise and their fantastic company. We are all grateful for all the support from our users, our customers and our investors, without whom we wouldn’t have made it this far and to this successful milestone with Bitrise. Please stay in touch, and if you have a mobile app, definitely check out Bitrise, as your mobile developers will appreciate it!
You can read more about the acquisition here: https://blog.bitrise.io/bitrise-acquires-outlyer
All the best,
David, Colin and the entire Outlyer team.