Cribl Acquires Tero to Build Out AI-Native Observability

SAN FRANCISCO -- Cribl, which bills itself as the AI platform for telemetry, announced during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 week that it has acquired Tero, a company that builds an intelligence layer for observability data.

Tero co-founders Ben Johnson, Adam Cohen and Nihar Singhal are joining 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. 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.

Expanding Into First-Party Observability

According to Cribl’s announcement, the Tero team will help lead work on host monitoring, application performance monitoring, federated observability and AI-native observability, which Cribl plans to bring onto the platform customers already use to collect, route and optimize telemetry. Tero is Cribl’s third acquisition in four months, following CardinalOps in July and Radiant Security’s AI SOC technology in August.

“We started Tero to help engineers understand their telemetry, not just collect more of it,” said Johnson, now vice president of observability at Cribl. “Cribl has the platform, the customers, and the momentum to define how observability works in the age of AI.”