Omnition

Omnition, established in 2018 by co-founders Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal, specialized in providing observability solutions for complex, modern IT environments. The company developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform focused on distributed tracing to improve the monitoring of microservices-based applications. This addressed a growing need for enterprises to gain clear visibility into how their increasingly complex and container-based application workloads, deployed using technologies like Docker and Kubernetes, were functioning end-to-end.

The founding team brought significant domain expertise to the venture. Spiros Xanthos, who served as CEO, had a background as an entrepreneur, having previously founded Log Insight (acquired by VMware) and Pattern Insight. Mayank Agarwal, the CTO, was a seasoned technologist with experience at major tech firms including Microsoft and VMware. Their vision was to create a solution that combined logs, metrics, and full-stack traces to provide a complete picture of application performance, a concept often referred to as the 'trifecta of observability'. Omnition's platform was designed for full-fidelity distributed tracing, aiming to capture 100% of transaction traces to give developers and operations teams a transparent view for troubleshooting.

Operating in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and observability market, Omnition's business model was centered on its SaaS platform. The company was also a significant contributor to open-source projects, which were central to its strategy. It was a key maintainer of OpenCensus (alongside Google and Microsoft) and a founding member and top contributor to OpenTelemetry, a project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that merged OpenCensus and OpenTracing to standardize telemetry data collection.

Just 15 months after its seed funding in May 2018 from Unusual Ventures, Omnition was acquired by Splunk in September 2019. The acquisition was a strategic move by Splunk to enhance its leadership in the observability and APM space, integrating Omnition's distributed tracing capabilities into its portfolio to offer more comprehensive monitoring solutions for customers with on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Keywords: Omnition, distributed tracing, observability, application performance monitoring, APM, microservices, Splunk, Spiros Xanthos, Mayank Agarwal, OpenTelemetry, OpenCensus, SaaS, cloud-native monitoring, IT monitoring, log analytics, container monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, data tracing, transaction tracking, system visibility