Grafana acquires Pyroscope and merges it with its Phlare continuous profiling database

Open source observability platform Grafana Labs today announced that it has acquired Pyroscope, the company behind the eponymous open source continuous profiling platform. Founded in 2020, the 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 its Phlare continuous observability database, with the merged service now called Grafana Pyroscope.

“We’ve admired the work that the Pyroscope team has done, 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’ve built a great community around continuous profiling, and we’re looking forward to working with both the team and the community to advance the state of the art in profiling technology.”

With the advent of cloud-native systems, continuous profiling became something of a necessity for companies that wanted 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 storing that in a database like Phlare. Grafana itself calls continuous profiling the “fourth pillar of observability” (the others being metrics, logs and traces — which tend to focus more on memory usage, networking data and logging data).

Pyroscope can gather data from across a company’s infrastructure, both through its agent and directly from the Linux kernel using eBPF. That data is then sent to the Pyroscope server, which is based on the BadgerDB key-value database.

And while there is a definite need for a product like this, it’s maybe more of a feature for the major observability platforms than a standalone product. That may be especially true in the current environment, where a lot of companies are trying to consolidate their infrastructure spending.

With $540 million in funding, Grafana is also in a good spot to pick up some of these smaller companies now, especially as the funding environment is becoming more difficult. 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 share with Grafana Labs strong roots in OSS and a belief that the developer experience is essential for helping engineering teams build, maintain, and operate great software,” said Ryan Perry, co-founder and CEO of Pyroscope. “We’re excited to bring our expertise and collaborate with the team.”