Chronosphere’s Calyptia Buy Completes Observability Trinity

With its acquisition of Calyptia earlier this month, Chronosphere will have competitive components for all three of the required pillars of a full-fledged observability platform: metrics, traces, and now logs.

Calyptia was built around the open source Fluentd and the associated FluentBit pipeline, two unified logging projects of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. They have become a de facto part of many cloud native stacks, including those run by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, and Google.

In addition to Calyptia’s expertise around the Fluent bits, what made Calyptia appealing was how nicely it fit with Chronosphere’s core values of keeping data costs low for users, said Martin Mao, CEO and co-founder of Chronosphere, in an interview with TNS.

“We’ve historically done that very well on the metric side, and on the tracing side,” Mao explained. “We give you visibility into the explosion of data into what’s causing it and how to fix these things. So it’s not just having these things, but it’s actually having having them cost reliably.”

The approach is certainly a differentiator when compared to a Chronosphere rival, DataDog,  which has been criticized for high customer bills.

(Also to keep observability costs manageable, Chronosphere also recently partnered with Crowdstrike to provide data storage for the Chronosphere platform.)

Calyptia fits into this value proposition comfortably, Mao said. Calyptia had a sharp focus on serving the enterprise, “building out the core pipeline product for the top end of the market,” he said.

The Three Pillars of Observability

In the past few years, what used to be known as monitoring has evolved into observability, which offers more tools to understand performance and help in troubleshooting. Observability is usually covered by three components: metrics, tracing and logging.

“Historically, there have been different solutions, and people piece it together themselves, but the industry is moving towards consolidation in a single platform,” Mao said.

Chronosphere plans to incorporate Calyptia’s log transformation and optimization capabilities into the company’s own platform.

“With Calyptia, telemetry can be automatically routed to a best-in-class observability solution (such as Chronosphere) for monitoring, to a SIEM platform that helps maintain your security posture, and to integrate disparate systems in cloud native environments,” wrote Eduardo Silva, founder and Fluentd core contributor of Calyptia, and creator of Fluentd, in a blog post.

What Is Fluentd?

The Fluentd is a highly scalable open source log processor, allowing users to collect telemetry from multiple sources and distribute them to analysis and monitoring systems.

Built on top of FluentBit is Calyptia’s observability pipeline, enabling the routing, transformation, and optimization of log data at scale. Users can add filters to reduce the amount of data being transferred. Data can also be enriched or redacted, and even analyzed in real time.

Thus far, FluentBit has been downloaded 12 billion times. Chronosphere pledges to invest in  Fluent projects and community, Mao said.

“Calyptia joining the Chronosphere team is excellent news for everyone who is invested in the future of open source cloud native technology,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CNCF CTO, in a statement on Chronosphere’s blog post.