groundcover, a San Francisco-based observability platform, has acquired Wand, a Kubernetes resource optimization company, marking its first acquisition and expanding its technology beyond infrastructure monitoring into automated infrastructure management.
The deal combines groundcover’s production observability capabilities with Wand’s technology for continuously managing computing resources in live Kubernetes environments. Wand’s founders and employees will join groundcover. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The acquisition supports groundcover’s strategy to develop infrastructure technology that enables software and AI agents to understand production environments and act on that information.
groundcover provides a bring-your-own-cloud observability platform built on eBPF and OpenTelemetry, technologies that collect information about the behavior and performance of applications and infrastructure.
Its architecture lets customers keep production telemetry in their own cloud environments, giving engineering teams visibility into operational performance while maintaining control over their data.
The platform collects information across applications and infrastructure, helping engineers investigate performance issues, identify changes, and understand incidents affecting production systems.
Wand adds another capability by enabling software to make and execute resource-allocation decisions within Kubernetes environments.
Kubernetes is widely used to deploy and manage containerized applications, but allocating computing resources efficiently can create operational challenges.
Engineering teams must determine how much CPU and memory individual workloads require, often before exposing applications to real production traffic.
Allocating too many resources can increase infrastructure costs, while insufficient capacity can cause performance problems or service disruptions.
These decisions also change over time as applications evolve and usage patterns fluctuate.
Existing Kubernetes automation systems frequently address different aspects of resource management independently.
Vertical scaling adjusts resources for individual workloads, horizontal scaling changes the number of application replicas, and cluster scaling adjusts the computing capacity available across the broader environment.
However, these mechanisms can interact in ways that create inefficiencies when managed separately.
Wand’s technology coordinates vertical, horizontal, and cluster-level resource decisions, using observed workload behavior to adjust infrastructure in real time.
Rather than generating recommendations engineers must implement manually, the platform continuously manages CPU and memory allocations as demand changes.
The technology operates directly within Kubernetes environments and can be deployed using a Helm chart.
Its approach prioritizes application performance and availability while eliminating unnecessary computing capacity and improving infrastructure efficiency.
By combining Wand’s automation technology with groundcover’s observability platform, the companies intend to develop systems that can use historical production information to make better infrastructure management decisions.
For example, detailed production telemetry can help distinguish between a workload that is consistently overprovisioned and one that periodically requires substantial additional capacity.
The same information can also help identify whether changes in application performance are associated with infrastructure conditions, software deployments, or other operational events.
groundcover plans to integrate additional engineering information with its existing telemetry, including records related to code, deployments, incidents, and previous operational decisions.
This information is intended to provide AI agents with a more comprehensive understanding of production environments before they execute infrastructure changes.
The acquisition will also support improvements to groundcover’s own cloud architecture.
Because the company’s software operates within customers’ cloud environments, its infrastructure consumption contributes directly to customers’ cloud expenses.
groundcover intends to use Wand’s resource optimization technology to improve the efficiency and resilience of its own data plane, potentially reducing the resources required to process and store observability information.
The company also plans to make Wand’s Kubernetes optimization capabilities available to groundcover customers, expanding its offering from infrastructure observability into operational automation.
Both platforms operate within customers’ environments, an architectural approach intended to retain control over the information and systems used to make infrastructure decisions.
Founded in 2021, groundcover is backed by investors including One Peak, Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit, and Jibe.
The acquisition provides additional technology and engineering expertise as groundcover develops a broader platform for monitoring and managing cloud infrastructure.
KEY QUOTES:
“Observability has become much more than a tool engineers use to understand what went wrong. In an AI-native software development cycle, production data becomes context that agents use to build, troubleshoot, fix and operate software. But understanding is only part of the problem. For infrastructure to become autonomous, systems also need to act safely on what they know. Wand has spent years building exactly that capability for Kubernetes.”
Shahar Azulay, CEO and Co-Founder of groundcover
“Right-sizing assumes we know the future. Spoiler: we don’t. Infrastructure changes continuously. Joining groundcover lets us combine Wand’s ability to act on live infrastructure with a much deeper understanding of what is happening across production.”
Shon Lev-Ran, CEO and Co-Founder of Wand
