Highlights:

  • Era Software will help customers get a unified observability solution at scale.
  • Era Software’s new technology and customer-centered approach to log management works well with existing Lightstep features and speeds up ServiceNow’s move toward unified telemetry (logs, metrics, traces).

ServiceNow, the world’s leading digital workflow company that makes the world work better for everyone, announced that it had signed a deal to buy Era Software, a leader in observability and log management. After ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in 2021, Era Software will help customers get a unified observability solution at scale. Customers can get insights that add value to the business, all from a single solution that was made for the digital business era.

Observability is a key part of digital transformation because it gives developers the much-needed information they need to understand how strategic applications perform at scale and how to turn that data into business value. Yet, in large companies, observability is often kept in separate silos and is expensive. This makes it hard for DevOps and SRE teams to work together.

Era Software’s new technology and customer-centered approach to log management works well with existing Lightstep features and speeds up ServiceNow’s move toward unified telemetry (logs, metrics, traces).

Ben Sigelman, general manager of ServiceNow’s Lightstep business unit and co-founder of Lightstep, said, “Digital transformation succeeds or fails based on unified observability. Together, ServiceNow and Era Software are set up to deliver a unified and seamless observability experience within one solution, designed to scale.”

As one of the companies that started the OpenTelemetry project, Lightstep is at the forefront of the industry’s push for unified telemetry. Together, Era Software and Lightstep will improve important, unified observability workflows. This will eliminate the confusing context switches that slow down the productivity of DevOps and SRE teams in most companies today.

Unified telemetry empowers teams to innovate quickly and precisely, which helps modern organizations get better results from all their technology investments and make the most of what digital transformation has to offer.

Todd Persen, CEO and co‑founder at Era Software, said, “At Era Software, we created solutions to simplify the complex challenges of managing large volumes of observability data, focusing on log management. We have always believed that observability should span across the enterprise. We are excited to join ServiceNow as we further build a customer-centric model of observability that can help transform the way people work.”

Since the company was founded, the Era Software team has developed new ways to manage log data that resolve scale, performance, and cost problems when running distributed applications on modern cloud-native architectures.

CEO Todd Persen and CTO Robert Winslow started Era Software in Seattle in 2019. Persen was a co-founder and chief technology officer at InfluxData, where he helped build the time-series database InfluxDB.

IDC predicts that the observability market will grow to USD 9.08 billion by 2025. This announcement highlights ServiceNow’s organic growth strategy, which focuses on talent and technologies that strengthen the Now Platform with new and improved customer features.

The present news comes close to ServiceNow’s acquisition of other firms, such as Hitch Works, DotWalk, Mapwize, and Gekkobrain. ServiceNow plans to finish buying Era Software in the fourth quarter of 2022. No information was given about how much the deal would cost.