APM Startup Instana Raises $30M More

Instana has just closed a $30 million Series C round. That brings the company’s total funding to date to $57 million.

This latest round was led by Meritech Capital. Instana’s Series B lead investor Accel also participated.

The continued investment in three-year-old Instana illustrates the growing need for enterprises to automate how they monitor and address performance of their applications and underlying network infrastructure.

That’s important given the growing number and importance of business applications. Automation on this front is becoming an absolute must as applications and networks become more disaggregated due to the adoption of cloud, container, and microservices solutions and architectures.

Instana refers to its solution as APM 3.0. APM stands for application performance management. That’s a well-known product category in which companies like Dynatrace and New Relic are market leaders.

But others – like FixStream and ScienceLogic – refer to automated application and infrastructure monitoring and control solutions as AIOps. That stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations.

Gartner in a 2017 study explained that “AIOps platforms are software systems that combine big data and AI or machine learning functionality to enhance and partially replace a broad range of IT operations processes and tasks, including availability and performance monitoring, event correlation and analysis, IT service management, and automation.”

AIOps and the evolution of APM will be the focus of a new TMC event early next year in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The event is called AIOps Expo.

This event was designed with the needs and interests of IT/operations team members, business systems analysts, CRM/Salesforce expects, industrial engineers, network admins and engineers, performance management experts, process engineers, service management team members, and unified communications engineers and experts in mind.

FixStream, an AIOps pioneer, and Dynatrace, an APM leader, will be among the companies speaking at AIOps Expo, which will run Jan. 30-Feb. 1. Other AIOps Expo speakers come from such companies as 2nd Watch, Ayehu, Citrix, KEMP Technologies, LogicMonitor, OpsRamp, RiskSense, SRI International, Testfire Labs, Virtual Instruments, and WHOA.

Edited by Maurice Nagle