Tracelytics

Tracelytics was an application performance management (APM) company that delivered its product as a software-as-a-service offering. Its system performed "smart tracing" across the full application stack, giving customers visibility into the behavior of distributed web applications and surfacing performance issues, bottlenecks and potential improvements. The service supported applications written in PHP, Python and Ruby and ran on Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and Linux Mint.

The company was founded by a core team of engineers who were dissatisfied with existing APM solutions. It was based in Providence, Rhode Island, and was an alumnus of the Betaspring accelerator; following its Series A it added a second office in Boston, Massachusetts. Leadership included CEO John Vigeant, previously at Novell, Citrix Systems and CloudBees, and co-founders Spiros Eliopoulos (CTO) and Dan Kuebrich ("Product Dude"), both previously of Amie Street, along with Chris Erway.

In June 2012 Tracelytics was acquired by AppNeta, a cloud-based network performance management vendor that shared investor Bain Capital Ventures and was likewise Boston-based. The stated intent was to combine application-level tracing with AppNeta's end-user and network ("on the wire") performance coverage, with Tracelytics expected to continue in the near term as a separate product while its application insights were folded into AppNeta's offering.

Founding story

According to the company's own materials, Tracelytics was founded in 2010 by a core team of engineers frustrated with the existing application performance management solutions available to them; a separate press account dates the founding to 2009. Two of the three co-founders, Spiros Eliopoulos and Dan Kuebrich, previously worked together at Amie Street.

Business model

Tracelytics sold application performance management as a hosted software-as-a-service subscription rather than as installed enterprise software, with customers instrumenting their web applications and consuming performance data through the vendor's service. A one-month free trial was offered as an entry point.

Subscription-based software-as-a-service for application performance monitoring; specific pricing is not disclosed in the sources.

Traction

Public product launch in November 2011; over 500 million traces executed as of March 2012; GitHub cited as an early user; $5.2 million Series A raised in March 2012 on top of seed funding from early 2011.

Latest developments

On 21 June 2012, AppNeta announced the acquisition of Tracelytics on undisclosed financial terms, less than three months after the Series A round closed. AppNeta indicated Tracelytics would likely remain a separate product long-term while its application insights and features were brought into the AppNeta product.