Cribl acquires Tero to build out monitoring tools for engineers and AI agents

Cribl has acquired Tero, bringing technology for identifying waste in software-monitoring data and a team tasked with building more monitoring capabilities on its platform. Announced November 10, 2026, the deal puts Tero’s founders and engineers inside Cribl’s observability roadmap, which the buyer says is aimed at both engineers and AI agents. Financial terms were not disclosed.

From collecting data to deciding what matters

Tero’s starting point was the data feeding observability tools—the systems engineers use to understand how software is running. According to Cribl, Tero built technology that measures how much of an organization’s telemetry, or monitoring data, is waste. It identifies low-value data across observability tools and lets engineers address it in the tools they already use.

That focus fits the problem Cribl CEO and co-founder Clint Sharp described in the acquisition announcement: helping engineers control their data and determine which of it matters. Sharp said the incoming team would help build observability directly on the platform customers already use, with engineers and the AI agents working alongside them as its intended users.

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.

Ben Johnson, Tero co-founder and Cribl VP of Observability

Tero’s founders take roles inside Cribl

The transaction brings all three Tero co-founders into Cribl alongside their engineering team: CEO Ben Johnson, CTO Adam Cohen and COO Nihar Singhal. Johnson is now Cribl’s vice president of observability. Their assignment is to help lead the product roadmap, giving the acquired team a role in developing Cribl’s own capabilities rather than simply supplying technology.

Johnson brings experience building another observability business. He previously co-founded Timber, the company that created the open-source Vector observability pipeline. Datadog acquired Timber in 2021. Cribl highlighted that background in announcing the deal, describing Johnson and the Tero engineers as additions intended to accelerate product development.

Tero is Cribl’s third acquisition in four months, following CardinalOps in July and Radiant Security’s AI security operations center technology in August. Cribl presents those purchases as parts of a move toward offering its own observability and security capabilities on a single open telemetry platform. The Tero acquisition supplies the latest team for that effort.

A monitoring roadmap, not a finished release

Cribl named four areas the Tero team will help lead: host monitoring, application performance monitoring, federated observability and AI-native observability. The company plans to bring those capabilities onto the same platform customers already use to collect, route and optimize telemetry. That connects the incoming team’s development work to Cribl’s existing data infrastructure.

Cribl describes its platform as shared infrastructure for IT and security data, supporting its own products as well as custom applications built by people and AI agents. It also says the platform can govern AI traffic, protect sensitive data and monitor AI usage, cost, performance and risk. Those are Cribl’s descriptions of its platform, not newly released Tero features.

The acquisition announcement establishes who is joining and where their work is headed. It does not set a release date for the capabilities the team will develop or give a rollout schedule for the roadmap. For customers, the next concrete step remains delivery of that monitoring work on Cribl’s platform.