Exceptional Buys Ranger To Give A Monitoring Shot In The Arm To Its ‘DevOps’ Platform

Steve O'Hear

Steve O’Hear is probably best known as a technology journalist, currently at TechCrunch where he focuses mainly on European startups, companies and products. He was previously co-founder and CEO of expertise platform Beepl where he helped the company navigate its first VC round, along with seeing the product through development, private alpha and a high profile public launch. In November... → Learn More

Thursday, November 29th, 2012
163941v1-max-250x250

There is some consolidation in the error-tracking/monitoring space. Exceptional, the error-tracking service for cloud developers, has announced the acquisition of the Ranger monitoring service to extend the U.S. company’s ‘DevOps’ platform. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although Exceptional CEO Jonathan Siegel tells me it’s a “solid six-figure purchase,” and covers the Ranger product (which has just been updated to version 2.0) and existing customer base-only.

It follows an earlier acquisition by Exceptional in February this year when the startup complemented its error-tracking offering by purchasing competitor Airbrake from web design and development company thoughtbot. Once again, financial terms were not released.

Launched in 2010, Ranger is used by customers of Heroku to monitor their cloud-based applications. It’s said to dovetail nicely with Exceptional and Airbrake — customers now get access to a “mission-critical DevOps platform” which tells them both when and why their app is down. Or so the pitch goes.

Exceptional claims that over 120,000 developers are using its error-tracking platform, which isn’t bad going for a company that hasn’t taken any outside funding. The acquisition of Ranger aims to consolidate the startup’s position as a leader in the space.

Shay Frendt, Ranger founder, says in a statement: “Adding Ranger to their family makes a huge amount of sense, monitoring and error-tracking go hand-in-hand so it makes the overall toolset even more useful for developers.”

Meanwhile, Siegel adds: “With complex application design that includes many moving parts, you need an intelligent monitoring platform to tell you exactly which service is down.”


Website: exceptional.io
Launch Date: 2010

Exceptional Software is the leading error tracking company in the market. Its products, Exceptional and Airbrake, collect errors and aggregate them so that developers can fix them quickly. Combined, the two have a customer base of over 75000, which include Groupon, Square, and AT&T among others; and handle over 30000 reports per minute.

→ Learn more