GitLab acquired Opstrace, an open source observability distribution solution.

With the acquisition of Opstrace, GitLab includes an integrated open source observability solution within a single application with one user interface, a unified data store, and security embedded within the DevOps lifecycle. GitLab expects to expand its monitoring and observability capabilities by offering organizations a new choice. GitLab believes organizations will no longer have to choose between a costly SaaS service whose pricing does not align with their organization’s goals, and a do-it-yourself observability solution stitched together using open-source components.

GitLab anticipates that this acquisition will provide an out-of-the-box, tested, integrated observability platform deployed within the GitLab DevOps Platform.

With this acquisition, GitLab will focus on the developer experience and will endeavor to offer robust monitoring and observability capabilities that will help better enable organizations to lower incident rates, increase developer productivity and lower mean-time-to-resolution with a zero-configuration observability solution built into the GitLab DevOps Platform. Once the Opstrace functionality is integrated into the Monitor stage, GitLab believes it will create a better developer experience and drive positive business outcomes with anticipated functionality such as guided instrumentation of their code, insights into recent performance degradations while making performance improvements, performance feedback from review environments in merge requests, automatic roll-back of deployments, and rapid exploration and triaging of incidents when they occur.

“...We will continue to foster a community of developers and operators to improve the observability experience so more developers have access to an integrated open source platform where they can be confident in the safety of their deployments and quickly mitigate production outages.” said Scott Williamson, CPO of GitLab.

Operators utilize a vast amount of SaaS services to manage their observability data, or manage infrastructure costs by building a do-it-yourself (DIY) observability platform from open source components. Opstrace provides a unique approach to observability by integrating independent open source monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Cortex, and Grafana into an installable observability platform that can easily be run on commodity infrastructure.

“Our goal with building Opstrace was to help make the open source observability space more accessible for developers and organizations through creating an end-to-end tested and secure observability solution," said Sebastien Pahl, Co-founder of Opstrace and now Principal Product Manager at GitLab.

“It is complex and expensive to build a robust and scalable observability system. We believe Opstrace provides control with secure API endpoints and convenience with an integrated, tested multi-tenant observability solution,” said Mat Appelman, Co-founder of Opstrace and now Principal Engineer at GitLab. “We anticipate investing every bit of operational experience back into the open source code which means everyone can contribute and benefit. We love that GitLab shares this philosophy.”

GitLab anticipates that the Opstrace technology will be integrated into the GitLab Monitor stage and will be available (turned on by default) for both GitLab SaaS and Self-Managed users.