Tracelytics Boosts SaaS APM Product WIth £3.2m Funding Round

Tracelytics, a startup provider of next-generation application performance management (APM) software as a service (SaaS), announced the close of a $5.2 million (£3.2m) Series A financing round led by Bain Capital Ventures.

Existing seed investors Google Ventures, Battery Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners also participated in the round. In the announcement today on Tracelytics’ blog, CTO Spiros Eliopoulos highlighted the rapid growth of the company and product since its initial seed funding, and the launch of a one-month free trial programme.

Full-stack APM

In his post, Eliopoulos said, “We’ve raised this money for two reasons: to keep improving the most comprehensive and powerful full-stack APM solution, and to scale our sales and marketing functions as a business. In support of this growth, the company, currently located in Providence, Rhode Island, is opening a headquarters in Boston.”

Tracelytics’ SaaS solution offers customers unique insights into the performance of their web applications, driving immediate time-to-value by revealing issues, bottlenecks and potential improvements. With smart tracing across the full application stack, Tracelytics delivers true visibility and management across distributed web-applications with any level of complexity, said John Vigeant, chief executive of the company.

Vigeant joined Tracelytics from CloudBees, a Java platform as a Service (PaaS) startup, where he was vice president of business development. Vigeant told eWEEK: “I recently left CloudBees to take on a chief executive role of a very interesting SaaS-based APM company by the name of Tracelytics. We compete with the likes of New Relic and AppDynamics.”

Since its initial seed funding in early 2011, Tracelytics has reached several key milestones, including: the introduction of smart tracing for the full application stack; support for PHP, Python and Ruby; the public launch of the product in November 2011; more than 500 million traces executed to date; and a one-month free trial available.

Complete visibility

“We currently support full-stack application tracing in PHP, Python and Ruby, and we are the only application performance management software to provide full-stack application tracing, which enables complete visibility into the performance of your web apps,” Vigeant told eWEEK. “Everyone else provides partial visibility into app performance. We will be adding support for more languages very soon.”

“When you’re dealing with massive applications, people often don’t really understand what’s going on in them,” said Aman Gupta, an engineer at GitHub, an early Tracelytics user, in a statement. “With Tracelytics, I immediately found issues that our other APM software had failed to identify. The first time you see it is completely mind blowing. Once someone gets a taste of the data, they’ll want to trace every app and every layer of their stack.”

“If your application is under-performing, then your business is under-performing,” said Ben Nye, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “Today’s enterprises need full-stack tracing to manage the performance of their highly distributed applications. We were impressed with the Tracelytics team’s deep understanding of the performance issues faced by modern business applications; they’ve built their entire solution from the ground up through the lens of the customer.”

Moreover, Vigeant said Bain Capital Ventures’ extensive experience in bringing infrastructure software to market made them an ideal choice for a partner. “We have always wanted more than just capital from our investors,” Vigeant said in a statement. “Bain Capital Ventures quickly demonstrated that they could be a true partner in scaling this company, and with their deep expertise in the APM market, I could not be more excited to have them as a member of the team.”

Smart tracing

Further explaining the Tracelytics APM approach, Eliopoulos said in his post: “The modern web application spans layers, hosts and applications–why settle for partial and piecemeal visibility into your stack? Tracelytics is the only application performance management solution that provides full-stack visibility, following requests across boundaries between layers, hosts and applications. Our smart tracing goes the extra mile so that you can solve tough problems that would be overlooked by legacy solutions. We are now able to use our smart tracing in PHP, Python and Ruby, and we’re working on more for the future.”

Founded in 2010 by a core team of engineers frustrated with the existing solutions, Tracelytics provides next-generation APM capabilities, the company said. Tracelytics’ solution offers customers unique insights into the performance of their web applications, driving immediate time-to-value by revealing issues, bottlenecks and potential improvements, the company added.

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