Welcome Calyptia to Chronosphere 

Chronosphere has been helping customers tackle Observability challenges in their cloud native environments since we opened our doors for business four and a half years ago. When we launched Chronosphere, my co-founder Rob Skillington and I were fresh off building and operating the Observability platform for one of the largest cloud native environments in the world at Uber. We saw first hand the problems and pressures that this new architecture places on Observability tooling and we have been solving these problems with innovative solutions since then. 

One of these solutions we’re well known for is helping customers control Observability data growth, which is outpacing infrastructure footprint growth by 2-3x. We started off by helping companies deal with high cardinality Metrics. Next, we helped companies control their distributed tracing volumes with dynamic sampling techniques. We were even the first Observability vendor to join the FinOps foundation and built the Observability Data Optimization Cycle. And most recently, the Chronosphere Observability platform added the ability to store and query Logs with Logs powered by CrowdStrike, which meant we needed to solve the data growth challenge for Logs as well.  

All telemetry data is growing at an incredible rate, but Logs are a special kind of beast due to the immense verbosity of Log data. Take these astounding findings from Gartner: Enterprises are producing higher than 10TBs per day of Logging data, with an increasing number observed in the 100TB range. That’s per day!

There are also dynamics with Logs that don’t exist for Metrics or Traces. For one, there is no industry standard Logging format or protocol like Prometheus for Metrics and OpenTelemetry for Traces. This makes controlling Log data growth a much harder problem as the solution needs to work across multiple protocols, coming from multiple sources. Unlike Metrics or Traces, there are also many different use cases for Logs — like security, audit, or Observability — and these use cases are solved with different tools. This means a company’s Log data is rarely stored in a single location.

These Log data growth and translation complexity challenges are exactly what the open source Fluent projects — created by the founders of Calyptia, Eduardo Silva and Anurag Gupta — are designed to solve. Fluent Bit can ingest telemetry data from multiple sources, in multiple formats, and route that data to multiple different Logging backends — seamlessly translating that data along the way. Calyptia, the leader in Observability pipelines, offers a product built on Fluent Bit that enables turnkey Log collection, aggregation, and transformation — ultimately allowing companies control of their Log data.

And with that context and intro, I am very excited to share today’s news about our acquisition of Calyptia and how Eduardo, Anurag, and the entire Calyptia team are now part of Chronosphere!

Acquiring the leading provider of Observability pipelines extends Chronosphere’s ability to control the data growth to all the telemetry types. This addition to Chronosphere’s platform also solves another problem in the industry by allowing companies to further reduce tool sprawl and consolidate on a single platform as opposed to stitching various products together from disparate vendors. 

The end result is a more effective Observability solution that seamlessly generates relevant context from all the telemetry types while helping companies improve their bottom line significantly.  

The positives in teaming with Calyptia go way beyond technology — we are a natural fit. For starters, Chronosphere and Calyptia are long-time friends. To see that friendship in action, look no further than Chronosphere’s first ever company blog published in May 2021, which recaps my fireside chat with Anurag at FluentCon.

We also have similar origin stories — we were both co-founded by two long-time colleagues and friends; we are both remote-first; and the success of both startups took hold during the pandemic when everything was happening online and cloud native adoption took off. 

The cultural values of the two companies are well aligned and then there’s the talent — team members from both startups are brimming with grit and can-do attitudes. Chronosphere’s talented team has always been a source of pride for me and I’m excited that we’ll be gaining more of the same from the Calyptia team. 

Calyptia is of course part and parcel with Fluent, which is a shining star in the open source world. Fluent Bit is a CNCF-graduated project under the umbrella of Fluentd and has already reached 12 billion downloads; is deployed millions of times per day; and cloud providers such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft include it with their Kubernetes offerings. 

But Fluent is more than just technology. Its massive, 10,000-strong user community makes it more of a movement. Now that Calyptia has joined Chronosphere, the investment into the community will not only continue, but increase. Adding to that, having Eduardo and Anurag on board brings continuity and our dedicated maintainers will continue their focus on open source contributions. Eduardo talks more about the Fluent community’s bright and continued future in his blog.

Each May I write my annual birthday blog to mark a new anniversary and to reflect back on what we’ve accomplished over the past year — and we’ve had some really huge milestones to celebrate such as our rounds of funding that total $343 million to date and which established us as a unicorn at only two years old.

Dare I say past milestones, grand as they are, almost pale in comparison to the acquisition of Calyptia and offering the complete data growth control capabilities in our Observability platform. In a flash, we’re now able to continue solving our customers’ most pressing challenge across the Log data type. And we’re doing this with an even larger team of Chronaut superstars who are distributed around the globe from the US to the UK to my beloved home country, Australia. My “Happy Fifth Birthday Chronosphere” blog is still a few months away, but I have an idea of what will be top of mind when I sit down to write it.

Welcome to the team, Calyptia!