SAN FRANCISCO — Nov. 10, 2026 — Cribl, the AI Platform for Telemetry, today announced it has acquired Tero, which builds an intelligence layer for observability data. Tero co-founders Ben Johnson (CEO), Adam Cohen (CTO), and Nihar Singhal (COO) join Cribl with their team of engineers to help lead its observability roadmap. Johnson previously co-founded Timber, which created the open source Vector observability pipeline and was acquired by Datadog in 2021.
“The best builders in observability are choosing to build with Cribl,” said Clint Sharp, co-founder and CEO of Cribl. “Ben has spent a decade on the hardest problem in this space: helping engineers control their data and know which of it actually matters. 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.”
Tero built technology that measures how much of an organization’s telemetry is waste, pinpoints low-value data across observability tools, and lets engineers fix it in the tools they already use. At Cribl, the team will help lead the roadmap across host monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), federated observability, and AI-native observability, bringing those capabilities onto the same open platform customers already use to collect, route, and optimize their telemetry.
“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,” said Johnson, VP of Observability at Cribl. “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.”
Tero is Cribl’s third acquisition in four months, following CardinalOps in July and Radiant Security’s AI SOC technology in August. The Tero deal brings Cribl a team with deep knowledge of the market, credibility with customers and partners, and the experience to accelerate product development. Together, these acquisitions extend Cribl’s market toward first-party observability and security capabilities on a single open telemetry platform.
Read more from Ben Johnson on why he joined Cribl on the Cribl blog, or visit the Cribl booth #205 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City.
