Cribl acquires Tero to lead observability roadmap

Cribl, described as the AI Platform for Telemetry, has acquired Tero, a company that builds an intelligence layer for observability data. The deal brings Tero's co-founders and engineering team into Cribl to help lead its observability roadmap.

Tero is the third acquisition Cribl has made in four months, following CardinalOps in July and Radiant Security's AI SOC technology in August. The Tero team brings market knowledge, credibility with customers and partners, and experience to accelerate product development. Together, the deals extend Cribl's work toward first-party observability and security capabilities on a single open telemetry platform.

Tero built technology that measures how much of an organization's telemetry is waste. The technology pinpoints low-value data across observability tools and lets engineers fix that data in the tools they already use.

The team will help lead roadmap work for host monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), federated observability, and AI-native observability. These capabilities will sit on the same open platform customers already use to collect, route, and optimize telemetry. Ben Johnson previously co-founded Timber, which created the open source Vector observability pipeline. Datadog acquired Timber in 2021.

Clint Sharp, co-founder and CEO of Cribl, said “The best builders in observability are choosing to build with Cribl.” Johnson, VP of Observability at Cribl, said “We started Tero to help engineers understand their telemetry, not just collect more of it. Watching what Cribl was shipping, it became clear we could either compete with them or build it together.”

Looking ahead, the companies described plans to build observability directly on the platform customers already trust with their data.