Cribl buys observability startup Tero and names Ben Johnson a VP

Cribl buys observability startup Tero and names Ben Johnson a VP

10 November 2026: Cribl, which calls itself the AI Platform for Telemetry, has acquired Tero, a startup that builds an intelligence layer for observability data. Tero's three co-founders and its engineers join Cribl, Ben Johnson becomes its VP of Observability, and Cribl has not disclosed the terms.

A startup that counts the waste

Tero built technology that measures how much of an organisation's telemetry is waste, pinpoints low-value data across observability tools, and lets engineers fix it in the tools they already use. That puts it close to Cribl's own ground: the release says customers use Cribl's platform to collect, route and optimise their telemetry.

"We started Tero to help engineers understand their telemetry, not just collect more of it," said Johnson. He added that watching what Cribl was shipping made it clear Tero "could either compete with them or build it together."

The founders and the Vector connection

Johnson is Tero's chief executive. He previously co-founded Timber, which created the open source Vector observability pipeline; Datadog acquired Timber in 2021. Adam Cohen, Tero's chief technology officer, and Nihar Singhal, its chief operating officer, also join, along with their team of engineers.

Clint Sharp, Cribl's co-founder and chief executive, framed the hire as a vote of confidence: "The best builders in observability are choosing to build with Cribl." He said Johnson has spent a decade on the problem of helping engineers control their data and know which of it matters.

The roadmap the team will lead

At Cribl, the Tero team will help lead the roadmap across host monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), federated observability and AI-native observability. Cribl says these will sit on the same open platform customers already use to collect, route and optimise telemetry.

The release describes that platform as a single shared infrastructure that powers Cribl's own SIEM, observability and AI SOC products, alongside custom applications that people and AI agents build on top of it. Cribl says half of the Fortune 100 trust it. It was founded in 2018, is remote-first and has an office in San Francisco.

Three deals since July

Cribl counts Tero as its third acquisition in four months. CardinalOps came in July, and the AI SOC technology of Radiant Security in August. Cribl says the deals together extend its market toward first-party observability and security capabilities on a single open telemetry platform.

For anyone running Tero's product today, the release says nothing about its future as a standalone offering or how customers will be moved. Cribl's release closes by pointing visitors to its booth, number 205, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City.

Related on TrustList:

• Traversal raises $120m Series B for its AI site reliability engineer
• Splunk Enterprise and SOAR fix critical flaws scoring up to 9.9
• BMC Helix ends Stackify Retrace on 31 March 2027 with no automated move

Sources

• Cribl: Cribl Acquires Tero to Lead Observability Into the AI Era, 10 November 2026, 10 November 2026