Dynatrace to acquire Rookout to deliver code debugging in production environments

Dynatrace recently announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rookout, a company that enables developers to quickly troubleshoot and debug actively running code in Kubernetes-hosted cloud-native applications. Adding Rookout to the Dynatrace platform will help developers accelerate innovation and deliver flawless and secure releases.

Developers are increasingly responsible for ensuring the quality and security of code throughout the software lifecycle. Traditional tools and approaches, however, only allow debugging in pre-production environments. Debugging in production often requires shutting down services. This can disrupt the users of the running application, slow down the application’s performance, or even crash it altogether.

Developer-first observability

Adding Rookout to the Dynatrace platform will provide developers with increased code-level observability of Kubernetes-hosted production environments. This will also add interactivity and control to troubleshooting and debugging in production, drastically reduce the need to replicate issues in pre-production environments and improve collaboration across development, IT, and security teams.

As Shahar Fogel, CEO at Rookout, said, “Our mission is to make debugging easy and fast for developers with state-of-the-art quality and a simple experience. We believe integrating Rookout into the Dynatrace platform and leveraging the artificial intelligence and automation capabilities Dynatrace is known for will accelerate this mission. This will also create a new standard for how engineers use developer-first, cloud-native observability to improve productivity by enabling them to spend less time on manual activities and more time delivering business value.”

Observability and security continue to converge

“Development teams are increasingly expected to incorporate observability and security capabilities into their solutions (shift-left) as well as perform testing, quality, and performance evaluation in production environments (shift right),” said Bernd Greifeneder, CTO at Dynatrace. “We believe acquiring Rookout will accelerate this process by providing our customers with developer-observability solutions that scale from a developer’s integrated development environment, or IDE, and are designed to enable their organizations to meet enterprise governance requirements. Our experience is that Rookout enables developers to troubleshoot and debug issues in production significantly faster than traditional tools and approaches, dramatically reducing the time they spend on maintenance activities.”

Closing of the proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to occur later in the company’s second quarter, which ends on September 30, 2023. The proposed transaction will not have a material impact on Dynatrace’s fiscal year 2024 financials and will be funded from cash on hand.