Google Acquires Cloud Monitoring Service Stackdriver

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Google today announced that it has acquired cloud monitoring service Stackdriver. The company plans to roll many of the service’s features into its Cloud Platform in the coming months. The financial details of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but the company has raised a total of $15 million in venture funding in two rounds led by Bain Capital and Flybridge Capital respectively.

Stackdriver, which launched in 2012, allows its users to monitor their cloud applications, automate some of the devops when things go wrong and see detailed stats about how they are using their cloud platforms.

The service is mostly known for monitoring Amazon Web Services but it also supports monitoring individual servers, Rackspace’s cloud services and Google Cloud Engine instances. When I talked to the company last year after it raised its Series B funding round, Stackdriver co-founder Izzy Azeri and Dan Belcher told me they were going to focus more on adding support for additional services, a focus that clearly paid off given today’s acquisition.

According to Google, the company will continue to offer all of its existing services going forward and will provide users with tools for working in a hybrid cloud environment. For the time being, the team will focus on integrating the service with the Google Cloud Platform, however, so that Google’s customers “can take advantage of these new advanced monitoring capabilities.”

Today’s acquisition news comes at an interesting time for Google’s cloud platform. Since starting a small price war in the cloud storage space a few weeks ago and launching a wide range of new services for its cloud storage and computation services, it sure feels like Google is taking this business unit very seriously right now. Amazon Web Services remains the leader in this space for the time being, but it doesn’t offer any easy-to-use monitoring services, for example.

Adding services like Stackdriver will also allow Google to make its platform stand out in the market, especially as cloud computing gets commoditized with prices continuing to trend lower and few options to differentiate based on the core compute and storage services all the players now offer.