The open source projects Grafana Phlare and Pyroscope will be combined under the name Grafana Pyroscope.
Pyroscope, the organisation behind the namesake open source continuous profiling technology, revealed that it has been bought by open source observability platform Grafana Labs. With customers like Sensor Tower, Confluent, Line, and Plaid, Pyroscope, a 2020 startup funded by Y Combinator, raised a seed investment in 2021. Grafana intends to combine Pyroscope and its Phlare continuous observability database into a single service that will be known as Grafana Pyroscope.
Continuous profiling became more or less necessary for businesses that wished to understand how their resources are being used with the introduction of cloud-native solutions. Regularly taking photos of a company’s whole computing infrastructure and saving them in a database like Phlare are the aim here. Continuous profiling is referred to as the “fourth pillar of observability” by Grafana (the other three pillars being metrics, logs, and traces, which often concentrate more on memory consumption, networking data, and logging data).
Pyroscope can collect information from all areas of an organization’s infrastructure utilising both its agent and eBPF to access the Linux kernel directly. The Pyroscope server, which is built on the BadgerDB key-value database, receives the data before sending it.
A solution like this is undoubtedly needed, however rather than being a solo offering, it may be more of a feature for the main observability platforms. It might be especially true in the present, when many businesses are attempting to combine their infrastructure spending.
Grafana is also in a good position to acquire some of these smaller businesses at the moment with $540 million in funding, especially since the finance situation is becoming more challenging. To assist developers in visualising their profiling data and “correlating it with their metrics, logs, and traces to gain a holistic view of their entire stack,” Grafana said it will natively incorporate Pyroscope onto its platform. The company’s hosted Grafana Cloud platform will also get these features.
“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.”
