GitLab Acquires Opstrace to Expand its DevOps Platform with Open Source Observability Solution

GitLab will create the first integrated observability solution within a DevOps Platform

GitLab Inc. (NASDAQ: GTLB), The DevOps Platform, today announced it 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. 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 are excited to further build out the GitLab DevOps Platform with Opstrace and anticipate being the first to offer an on by default, collaborative observability solution,” said Scott Williamson, Chief Product Officer of GitLab. “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.”

Based on GitLab’s 2021 DevSecOps survey, nearly 50% of operations professionals said their teams use between two and five monitoring tools, while 28% don’t use any monitoring tools at all. This data shows that 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. "We’re excited to join the GitLab team and help play a role in integrating Opstrace into GitLab’s DevOps platform."

“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. For additional details on the integration progress, follow this GitLab epic. Please also visit GitLab’s website for more information regarding GitLab’s Monitor direction.

GitLab’s public handbook also includes an acquisition section which outlines the transparent approach the Company takes on Corporate Development, from sharing a target company profile through to listing the financial incentives it offers to teams.

GitLab is The DevOps platform that empowers organizations to maximize the overall return on software development by delivering software faster and efficiently, while strengthening security and compliance. GitLab’s single application is easier to use, leads to faster cycle time and allows visibility throughout and control over all stages of the DevOps lifecycle. With GitLab, every team in your organization can collaboratively plan, build, secure, and deploy software to drive business outcomes faster with complete transparency, consistency and traceability.

Built on Open Source, GitLab works alongside its growing community, which is composed of thousands of developers and millions of users, to continuously deliver new DevOps innovations. GitLab has an estimated 30 million+ registered users (both Paid and Free) from startups to global enterprises, including Ticketmaster, Jaguar Land Rover, Nasdaq, Dish Network, and Comcast trust GitLab to deliver great software faster. All-remote since inception, GitLab has more than 1,350 team members in over 65 countries.

Christina Weaver


GitLab Inc.


[email protected]