Cribl buys Tero in third acquisition in four months
What's the deal? Telemetry software maker Cribl has acquired TeroDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a startup that builds an intelligence layer for observability data. The deal was announced on November 10, 2026. Terms were not disclosed.
What does Tero do? Tero's technology measures how much of a company's telemetry is waste and pinpoints low-value data across observability tools, letting engineers fix it where they already work. At Cribl, the team will help lead the roadmap for host monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), federated observability, and AI-native observability.
The hire: Tero co-founders join Cribl, including chief executive officer Ben Johnson, who becomes VP of observability. Johnson previously co-founded TimberDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, which created the open source Vector observability pipeline and was acquired by Datadog in 2021. Fellow co-founders Adam Cohen and Nihar Singhal join with their engineering team.
Why now? Tero is Cribl's third acquisition in four months, following CardinalOps in July and Radiant Security's AI SOC technology in August. Together, these deals push Cribl from telemetry routing and optimization toward first-party observability and security on a single open platform.
"Cribl has the platform, the customers, and the momentum to define how observability works in the age of AI," Johnson said. "That's where I want to be building."
What's the endgame? Cribl, which says it is trusted by half of the Fortune 100, wants to build observability directly on the platform customers already use to collect, route, and optimize their data. "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 co-founder and chief executive officer Clint Sharp.
The signal: The deal fits a wider 2026 race to consolidate observability and AI capabilities, with rivals including Dynatrace, Datadog, Elastic, and Splunk also making AI-related moves. Tracking AI costs and monitoring agents have become prominent themes. Cribl's bet will depend on how quickly these capabilities reach customers.
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Image credit: Gabriele Barni
