SolarWinds Acquires Log Management Service Papertrail For $41M In Cash

The publicly traded IT performance management service SolarWinds today announced that it has acquired Papertrail, a log management service, for $41 million in cash. SolarWinds may not be a household name, but it’s the parent company of website monitoring service Pingdom, which it acquired last year, and cloud monitoring service Librato, which it acquired earlier this year.
With the Papertrail acquisition, SolarWinds aims to expand its monitoring portfolio. “The acquisition of Papertrail adds another key element of that overall performance monitoring experience and we look forward to having the Papertrail team and technology as a part of our organization,” SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson said in a statement today.
“Our mission with SolarWinds Cloud is to offer IT operations teams the ability to extend the real-time visibility and actionable insights our products provide on-premise to their cloud-based infrastructure so they can effectively manage the performance and accelerated troubleshooting of native cloud applications.”

Papertrail allows companies to aggregate log files from a wide variety of popular products like Apache, MySQL and Heroku, as well as Ruby on Rails apps, different cloud hosting services and other standard text log files. Papertrail customers can then use the company’s browser-based search interface or its command-line tools to search through these files to diagnose bugs and performance issues. Conveniently, the tools also integrates with the SolarWinds-owned Librato, as well as Geckoboard, for graphing results.
Current Papertrail users include Adobe, GitHub and DNSimple. The company tells me that Papertrail will continue to operate as usual and SolarWinds will continue to develop and sell the product under the Papertrail monicker.