Open source observability platform Grafana Labs announced today that it has been acquired Pyroscopethe company behind the eponymous open source continuous profiling platform. Founded in 2020, Y Combinator-backed Pyroscope raised a seed round in 2021 and counts the likes of Sensor Tower, Confluent, Line and Plaid among its customers. Grafana plans to integrate Pyroscope with it Flare continuous observability database, with an integrated service called Grafana Pyroscope.
“We admire the work done by the Pyroscope team, and feel that the combination of Pyroscope, Phlare, and Grafana will really help bring continuous profiling to the masses,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs. “They have built a great community around continuous profiling, and we look forward to working with both the team and the community to advance the state of the art in profiling technology.”
Photo Credits: Grafana Labs
With the advent of cloud-native systems, continuous profiling has become something of a necessity for companies that want to understand how their resources are being used. The idea here is to create regular snapshots of a company’s entire compute infrastructure and then store that in a database like Phlare. Grafana itself calls continuous profiling the “fourth pillar of observation” (the others are metrics, logs, and traces – which focus more on memory usage, networking data and logging).
Pyroscope can gather data from the entire company infrastructure, through its agent and directly from the Linux kernel using eBPF. That data will be sent to the Pyroscope server, which is based on the BadgerDB key-value database.
Photo Credits: Pyroscope
And while there’s definitely a need for a product like this, it’s probably more of a feature for major observation platforms than a standalone product. That may be especially true in the current environment, where many companies are trying to consolidate their infrastructure spending.
With $540 million in funding, Grafana is also in a good place to pick up some of these smaller companies right now, especially as the funding environment gets tougher. Grafana says it will natively integrate Pyroscope into its platform to help developers visualize their profiling data and “correlate it with their metrics, logs, and traces to get a comprehensive view of their entire stack. ” These capabilities will also come to the company’s hosted Grafana Cloud platform.
“We at Grafana Labs share a strong background in OSS and a belief that developer experience is essential for helping engineering teams build, maintain, and operate great software,” said Ryan Perry, co-founder and CEO of Pyroscope. “We are excited to bring our expertise and work with the team.”