GitLab acquires Opstrace to expand its DevOps platform with Open Source Observability solution.
FAQ
What is the announcement?
- GitLab Inc. has acquired Opstrace, Inc., an open source observability distribution. With the acquisition of Opstrace, GitLab continues to define the future of DevOps platforms and anticipates being the first to include 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.
Why is GitLab acquiring Opstrace? What new benefits and capabilities does Opstrace bring to GitLab?
- 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 including:
- Guided instrumentation of application code
- Insights into recent performance degradations while making performance improvements
- Performance feedback from review environments in merge requests
- Automatic roll-back of deployments
- Rapid exploration and triaging of incidents when they occur
What were GitLab’s monitor and observability capabilities prior to this acquisition?
- In the Monitoring space, we believe GitLab has robust capabilities for incident management, escalation policies and alert management. Currently in observability specifically, GitLab does not believe it has the functionality for Metrics, Logs and Traces that we would like. All of these capabilities have lower adoption rates than other capabilities, which we attributed to them not being integrated or available out-of-the-box. As a result, we looked for alternative ways to improve developers’ experience with observability.
- With the acquisition of Opstrace, GitLab continues to define the future of DevOps platforms and anticipates being the first to include 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.
Where do you see Observability in the next 3-5 years?
- Observability started with the notion of three pillars of telemetry including metrics, logs and traces enabling the understanding of the state of a production application quickly. It’s shifted to include the tools application operators require to quickly restore any service degradation including application instrumentation and performance monitoring.
- Like many components of DevOps, tool integration costs are a challenge for observability initiatives. Making the different tools involved easy-to-use by application teams, and ensuring reliable operations will make an immense difference in democratizing observability to all applications.
- One big part of democratizing observability will be providing better collaboration spaces for teams when triaging and investigating observability data.
How many Opstrace team members will be joining GitLab?
- 6 team members will be joining GitLab. These team members will be forming a new group within the Monitor stage called Monitor::Observability. The existing Monitor group will be named Monitor::Health.
What are the technologies that GitLab is acquiring?
- Opstrace provides a unique approach to observability by connecting open-source monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Cortex, and Grafana into an installable observability distribution.
Will this be integrated into GitLab?
- 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.
- We’ll work to ensure that there is tenant and user integration so that developers can collaborate using their same logins and administrators can isolate observability data when needed. In future versions of GitLab, we anticipate shipping with an Opstrace observability platform installed by default.
- While it will be available as part of future versions of GitLab, we will continue to consider the Opstrace platform as a separate code-base that can also be independently installed outside of a GitLab instance. This serves two critical purposes:
- It allows organizations to deploy their observability platform closer to their applications.
- It allows for independent contributions to the Opstrace platform.
Which tier will Opstrace be offered at?
- All current and medium term functionality of Opstrace will be offered in the GitLab Free tier. The tier of future features will be determined based on GitLab’s buyer based tiering strategy.
What does this mean for GitLab customers using other observability technologies?
- GitLab will continue to offer integration points to trigger alerts and incidents for existing monitoring tools.