Cribl Looks To Boost Observability Data Capabilities With Acquisition

Cribl has acquired Tero, a developer of “intelligence layer” technology that helps engineers sort through volumes of telemetry data to determine what’s useful and what’s not.

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Cribl is extending the observability capabilities of its data telemetry platform with the acquisition of Tero, a developer of agent-native intelligence technology for sorting observability data.

With the acquisition, Cribl’s third in just four months, the company looks to “lead observability” into the AI era, the company said, citing the expected gains from both the acquired Tero technology and the expertise of its developers who are joining Cribl.

Tero co-founders Ben Johnson and Adam Cohen, the company’s CEO and CTO, respectively, and COO Nihar Singhal, are joining Cribl along with Tero’s engineering team. Johnson will become vice president of observability at Cribl, the company said.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Founded in 2025, Tero, headquartered in California, Ky., develops software tools used to identify and remove redundant observability data. The company had raised $2.6 million in seed funding from NextView Ventures.

Before co-founding Tero, Johnson co-founded Timber, which created the open-source Vector observability pipeline technology that was acquired by Datadog in 2021.

“Ben has spent a decade on the hardest problem in this space: helping engineers control their data and know which of it actually matters,” said Cribl co-founder and CEO Clint Sharp (pictured), in a statement. “Now he and his team will help us take the next step, building observability directly on the platform our customers already trust with their data, for engineers and the AI agents working alongside them.”

The Tero technology measures how much of an organization’s telemetry data is waste, pinpoints low-value data across observability tools, and helps engineers fix it within the tools they already use, Cribl said in the acquisition announcement.

“We started Tero to help engineers understand their telemetry, not just collect more of it,” Johnson said in a statement. “Watching what Cribl was shipping, it became clear we could either compete with them or build it together. Cribl has the platform, the customers, and the momentum to define how observability works in the age of AI. That’s where I want to be building.”

Cribl’s Tero Plans

The Tero team will lead Cribl’s product roadmap “across host monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), federated observability and AI-native observability, bringing those capabilities into the Cribl platform that’s used to collect, route, and optimize telemetry,” the company said.

"Observability has traditionally been a tough market for partners to build a business in, and we see an opportunity to open more of it up to the channel,” Sharp said in a statement provided to CRN about the impact on, and potential benefits of, the Tero acquisition for Cribl’s channel partners. “We’ve built Cribl’s business around partners, and this acquisition gives them a path to a much stronger foothold in observability.”

“What we’re building is different: a single engine for all observability data, on data customers own, that they can customize to how they actually work, and that’s ready for the AI agents now working alongside engineers,” Sharp said. “That gives partners room to win more observability deals and deliver new services and applications on top of it. We want partners leading those engagements and growing their businesses with us, while customers retain the choice and control they expect from Cribl."

In July Cribl announced a deal to buy CardinalOps, a developer of agentic detection engineering software, in a move Cribl said would expand the capabilities of its platform into the realm of security operations, helping customers improve security threat coverage, lower data costs and bolster security operations centers (SOCs).

Cribl further advanced its platform’s SOC capabilities in August when it acquired technology assets from Radiant Security’s AI-native security operations center product including intellectual property to autonomously triage, investigate, and resolve security alerts. Cribl said it was adapting the technology to run as an application on its telemetry data platform.