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."

Image Credits: Grafana Labs

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.