Lightbend—provider of the leading Reactive application development platform for building distributed applications—today announced the acquisition of OpsClarity, an advanced monitoring solution specifically designed for end-to-end visibility into the application infrastructure and data pipeline for streaming applications. The addition of OpsClarity’s advanced monitoring capabilities to the Reactive Platform comes just nine months after Lightbend acquired Reactive consulting firm BoldRadius.
“Digital business initiatives require new features and capabilities in application platforms,” said Alan Ngai, Founder of OpsClarity and now VP of Cloud Services at Lightbend. “By joining forces with Lightbend, we bring advanced monitoring capabilities to the Reactive Platform for real-time collection and analysis metrics, automatic discovery of dynamic components across distributed systems, and built-in intelligence about the specific open source frameworks.”
According to Gartner (https://info.lightbend.com/COLL-20XX-Gartner-Market-Guide_RES-LP.html), “Application leaders responsible for modernizing application infrastructure should design all new businesses to be cloud-native, irrespective of whether or not you plan to deploy them to the cloud.”1  As the SMACK stack — Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra, Kafka — is becoming ubiquitous for enterprises transforming their business to a cloud-first approach, developers, DevOps and traditional IT operators have struggled to get the insights they need to run and optimize these distributed frameworks.
Lightbend sees four common use cases that are challenging enterprise dev and ops teams with the limitations of their existing APM and Infrastructure Monitoring tools (for whom OpsClarity solves key challenges):
Those leveraging ephemeral infrastructure like containers, AWS auto-scaling groups etc.
Those running a dynamic environment with continuous integration, which implies new code is pushed frequently, often multiple times a week, if not days.
Those leveraging microservices, modern Reactive frameworks and 12-factor pattern.
Those using modern data frameworks like Apache Spark, Kafka, Flink, no-SQL stores etc., rather than traditional databases.
The OpsClarity solution is built upon deep integration with the growing list of open source, distributed frameworks that enterprise developers use to build complex, streaming, data-driven applications. OpsClarity not only gives rich insights into individual framework performance at run-time, but also visually correlates events across multiple microservices and data frameworks. OpsClarity bridges the concerns of developers, DevOps and operations teams, allowing much simpler identification of performance bottlenecks across complex microservices-based, modern applications. Taken together, these capabilities help enterprises minimize application and business service downtime, optimize performance and provide end-users with a superior quality of service.
“Lightbend is committed to helping our customers build Reactive systems and to move workloads to the cloud,” said Mark Brewer, CEO at Lightbend. “With the acquisitions of OpsClarity and BoldRadius, we are bolstering our software solutions and professional services capabilities to better support enterprises on their digital transformation journey.”
OpsClarity is immediately available for Lightbend Reactive Platform subscribers.  Lightbend Reactive Platform is the ideal development platform for hybrid and cloud-native applications, where microservices and streaming frameworks are the essential building blocks for delivering scalability, elasticity, and higher developer productivity.