The News: Observability and security vendor Dynatrace signed a definitive agreement to acquire startup Rookout, which sells debugging products for developers. See the full Press Release on the Dynatrace website.

Dynatrace Will Acquire Rookout to Add Code Debugging to its Observability

Analyst Take: As the scope of Observability looks to extend beyond its roots of logs and become a key part of the operations and security focus for enterprises, vendors such as Dynatrace are bringing new functionality to their offerings. Another dynamic in the highly-competitive Observability market segment is that vendors need to continually innovate and show the breadth of their innovation to compete, especially as cloud-native deployments proliferate.

Against this backdrop, the acquisition of Rookout by Dynatrace looks to align with the wider market trends we are observing, especially when you factor in the mainstream deployment of Kubernetes environments. As part of the announcement, Dynatrace said it plans to embed Rookout technology into its unified observability and security platform.

Rookout helps developers troubleshoot and debug actively running code in Kubernetes-hosted cloud-native applications. The addition of Rookout into the Dynatrace platform will give developers more code-level observability and control while troubleshooting and debugging in production. Developers will be able to debug applications in production without shutting down services, which can cause application crashes or slow performance. Many traditional tools only allow debugging during pre-production.

The combination of Dynatrace and Rookout will also give development, IT, and security teams a single platform for observability, security analytics, and automation. Dynatrace’s AI and automation capabilities can speed debugging and eliminate manual tasks.

When you couple the Rookout functionality with the capabilities of Dynatrace Davis AI, which analyzes historical patterns and trends in this data, and makes recommendations for future actions, the offering is very likely to make a compelling proposition for customers.

The Rookout acquisition comes 6 months after Dynatrace added three software intelligence apps to its platform:

Dynatrace Carbon Impact provides real-time insights into the carbon footprint of an organization’s Dynatrace-monitored hybrid and multicloud ecosystem, showing customers the progress of their carbon reduction initiatives.
Dynatrace AutomationEngine, built with the Davis AI default causation engine, adds automation to help customers operate their cloud infrastructures more efficiently.
Dynatrace AppEngine, like AutomationEngine, is a low-code tool that allows enterprises to design and build custom, compliant, and intelligent data-driven apps for their IT, development, security, and business teams.

The deal is expected to close by September 30, according to the company. Dynatrace said the acquisition will not have a material impact on its fiscal year 2024 financials and will be funded from cash on hand. The purchase price was not disclosed.

Looking Ahead

Dynatrace is well-positioned with its current portfolio to address the needs of enterprises wrestling with the dual challenges of managing a hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure landscape and ensuring that security is maintained. With the addition of the Rookout capabilities, we are bullish about Dynatrace’s ability to compete in a highly competitive market for both observability and security.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.