Cribl buys Tero to cut waste data for engineers and AI agents
Cribl, which collects and routes machine data, bought Tero to decide which of that data is worth keeping.
Cribl announced on 10 November 2026 that it bought Tero, a company whose technology finds low-value observability data. Observability data is the data that running software sends out so that engineers can see what it does. The deal is the third for Cribl in four months, and the text gives no price. Tero’s three founders join Cribl.
What Cribl gets
Tero measures how much of this data is waste. It finds low-value data across tools and lets engineers act on it in their own tools. Ben Johnson, a Tero founder, becomes head of observability at Cribl.
The plan
Johnson says AI agents are becoming main users of production data, next to engineers. The plan is to keep one shared view of production for both. Host monitoring and application performance monitoring would run as apps on that base.
What is not known
No customer results are given. The test is whether Cribl can give agents broad access to useful evidence. It must not recreate isolated data stores and ungoverned access. The earlier deals were CardinalOps in July 2026 and Radiant Security technology in August 2026.
Insight: Data vendors race to own what AI agents read
Confluent launched Lightning Tables on 4 November 2026 to give agents live data with fewer copies. Days later, Cribl bought Tero to decide which data is worth keeping. Its CEO Clint Sharp wrote that “Your telemetry is the durable asset.” This reads as a race to control the data that agents query. The one who sets what is kept shapes what agents can know. Ask where that choice sits in your stack.
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