Grafana Labs announced that it has acquired Pyroscope, the company that created the popular open source continuous profiling project of the same name. With this acquisition, Grafana Phlare, the open source continuous profiling database that Grafana Labs launched last year, and the Pyroscope project will be merged under the new name Grafana Pyroscope. 

Continuous profiling has been dubbed the fourth pillar of observability (after metrics, logs, and traces). It offers developers a deeper view of resource usage of their code, allowing them to understand their application performance and optimize their infrastructure spend. 

The new Grafana Pyroscope will natively integrate with Grafana, making it possible for developers to visualize their profiling data and correlate it with their metrics, logs, and traces to get a comprehensive view of their entire stack. Leveraging Grafana Pyroscope, Grafana Labs also plans to add profiling capabilities to the fully managed Grafana Cloud observability platform, which already brings together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana visualizations.

Founded by Ryan Perry and Dmitry Filimonov in 2021, Pyroscope was backed by Y Combinator. In addition to the open source project - which has garnered 7.2k stars in GitHub and has integrated with Grafana via a plugin since mid-2021 - Pyroscope also offers a Pyroscope Cloud product. 

"We share with Grafana Labs strong roots in open source and a belief that the developer experience is essential for helping engineering teams build, maintain, and operate great software," said Ryan Perry, co-founder and CEO of Pyroscope. "We're excited to bring our expertise and collaborate with the team." 

"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."