Over the last 12 to 18 months, the monitoring and alerting piece of the DevOps toolchain has been going through some serious consolidation. Companies are bracing to compete with the world or getting picked up by larger DevOps players, making their product more appealing through integrations.

In general, if such changes don’t impact your toolchain, I say ignore them. The exception is when it appears the entire submarket might need to get aligned to survive, because that means at some point your toolchain likely will be affected.

So, to recap the source of this blog, in the last short while OpsGenie has become a part of Atlassian, VictorOps has become a part of Splunk and PagerDuty has filed for an IPO. It is likely the rest of the market will have to match these three or admit to eroding market shares. In a competitive market where customers are using a fraction of the available functionality of a given product, deeper integrations (like come from ownership) or bold road maps (like come from IPOs) can have an impact on what customers choose to use.

Alerting—and monitoring in general—is still relatively new to its current incarnation, and unlike some markets there are still very real differentiators in it. Most alerting engines have a core of functionality built in, while a lot more functionality can be had through integrations with other products. Some focus on the network to garner the bulk of their alert conditions, while others focus on application performance and still more watch the infrastructure closely. While all do a bit of each of these things, they still definitely have a focus. That will change over time as the market either settles down or fragments. I’m hoping it will settle down; we have enough sub-markets in DevOps already.

All I’m suggesting is that you stay in contact with your vendor of choice and watch the overall market. Some of the changes might create a situation in which an alternative is appealing, and that is worth looking into, but other changes might negatively impact your chosen solution, which is absolutely worth noting.

If your product of choice is clipping along in a way that is acceptable/useful to you, by all means stay with it. There’s no sense changing a product simply because of possibilities. But being aware can help you navigate the market changes that are well underway and very well might hit you right in the stack.

— Don Macvittie