Publicly traded development tooling company GitLab Inc. today announced that it has bought Opstrace Inc., a startup with an observability platform for detecting technical issues in cloud environments.

Financial terms were not disclosed. The acquisition is the first to be announced by GitLab since its initial public offering in October, which raised about $650 million.

San Francisco-based Opstrace provides an observability platform that developers can use to collect troubleshooting data from their applications. The startup provides the platform under an open-source license. According to Opstrace, its software is simpler to deploy and maintain than other open-source observability tools. 

One of the main challenges involved in using observability tools is that they can be tricky to set up. The more complex the infrastructure environment that a company is looking to monitor, the more difficult it is to add a new piece of software. Opstrace promises to simplify administrators’ work. According to the startup, its platform takes a single line of code to install and can start collecting observability data in about a minute.

After administrators set up a new observability tool in their company’s technology environment, they have to maintain it. Updates must be downloaded and set up as they become available, which can involve a great deal of manual work. If errors emerge during installation, the process becomes even more complicated. 

Opstrace says its platform saves time for administrators by allowing them to install updates with a single line of code. A built-in troubleshooting mechanism checks for installation issues and fixes them automatically. 

Opstrace’s platform can be used to monitor Kubernetes environments, databases and other information technology assets. It works with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

GitLab plans to integrate Opstrace’s software into its flagship product, the GitLab DevOps Platform. Six Opstrace employees are joining the company to support the integration effort.

GitLab’s platform originally focused mainly on helping software teams manage the code files they use in their application projects. Over the years, the company has expanded to numerous other segments of the development tooling market. Its platform now includes features that software teams can use to track to-do items, scan code for vulnerabilities and deploy applications to production, among other tasks.

The technology that GitLab is obtaining through the acquisition of Opstrace will enable it to expand its feature set with the addition of new observability capabilities. The company is promising several benefits for users.

Opstrace’s technology will “enable organizations to lower incident rates, increase developer productivity and lower mean-time-to-resolution with a zero-configuration observability solution,” Opstrace co-founders Sébastien Pahl and Mat Appelman wrote in a blog post.

GitLab plans to build Opstrace features into both the software-as-a-service version of its platform and the Self-Managed edition. The latter offering allows enterprises to deploy GitLab’s platform in their own cloud or on-premises environments. Opstrace’s software will also continue to be available as a standalone product. 

Image: GitLab