The nature of enterprise IT infrastructure has changed dramatically over the past several years, well past the point that traditional monitoring tools have not been able to keep up, according to
Paul Appleby, president and CEO of
Virtana, which builds observability tools for hybrid environments.
The continued expansion of multi-cloud policies, containerized workloads, and applications in data centers, cloud, and at-the-edge have created distributed and highly complex IT environments that organizations are already struggling with coupled with other pressures.
“Enterprises are managing sprawling infrastructures and rapidly scaling services while juggling performance, cost, and compliance – all at once,” Appleby
wrote in a blog post. “Yet most observability solutions remain fragmented or narrowly focused, leaving teams without the full context they need to act quickly and confidently.”
Enter Zenoss
Virtana executives are hoping to address the challenges with the acquisition of
Zenoss, known for its IT service monitoring tools and AIOps-powered full-stack infrastructure visibility.
Together,
the two companies will be able to address the needs of the evolving IT infrastructure environment by pulling together Zenoss’ AIOps and Virtana’s agentic AI and machine learning models that address capacity and cost optimizations, which Appleby wrote is “creating a platform that delivers real-time correlation, actionable insights, and automated resolution across the full stack,” from the application up to the servers, storage, and networking.
“This combination is what today’s complex environments demand,” the CEO wrote. “Observability can no longer live in disconnected tools or disjointed dashboards. The next generation of enterprise operations requires a unified system of intelligence – one that spans technology domains and translates telemetry into outcomes.”
A Unified Platform
Virtana’s platform already address observability for the data fabric, compute, and storage of infrastructures in a cross-platform manner that uses AI agents, AI and machine learning analytics, automation, and orchestration. The company says its customer list includes more than 150 Global 2000 companies, including Amazon, Dell Technologies, Cigna, and Navy Federal Credit Union.
For its part, Austin, Texas-based Zenoss’ offerings include immediate root-cause analysis of events, optimized infrastructure performance, and automation to accelerate incident resolution and reduce alerts. The company monitors 1 million resources around the world and more than 70 billion data points every day, with more than 200 million daily data points per customer.
Appleby also said that the merged company is starting to integrate products and develop enhanced features, with teams from both already working together.
The Channel's Central Role
MSSPs, MSPs, and other partners will play a central role in the transition to a unified company and in bringing the combined platform to market, according to
Leslie Maher, senior vice president of strategic alliances at Palo Alto, California-based Virtana.
“The Virtana-Zenoss deal is good news for partners, especially MSSPs and MSPs,” Maher told MSSP Alert. “Together, they now offer a platform that gives both the breadth and depth of observability that service providers have been asking for. Observability is no longer just ‘nice to have.’ It’s now material to delivering reliable, efficient, and cost-effective services.”
Enterprise environments will continue to become more complex through hybrid clouds, AI workloads, and distributed infrastructure, she said. MSSPs and MSPs need real-time visibility to remain competitive, and the combined Virtana-Zenoss platform will enable that. They are under the same pressures as other organizations to scale operations while keeping costs in line.
The new unified platform, which fits with the trend in cybersecurity toward highly integrated platforms rather than single tools, will help partners reduce complexity, minimize licensing and integration challenges, and free up staff to focus on higher up services, Maher said.
“That means they can grow their customer base and expand their offerings without proportionally increasing costs or headcount,” she said. “It also opens up new ways for MSSPs to expand services: faster root-cause analysis, improved incident response, and the chance to bundle infrastructure monitoring with cost optimization for premium managed service offerings.”
