A map of observability vendors and startups: where their headquarters are, which law they operate under, what is open source, who supports OpenTelemetry natively and who belongs to which group. Every card is sourced and dated.
For: architects · finance, risk and compliance · executives and CIOsPrerequisites: None.
Reading mode
Decision-maker reading: bridges first.
Illustrative scenario: leadership asks for a “sovereign” observability solution. The architect opens a list of well-known names and finds that half of them changed hands in two years. A European vendor now belongs to an American group. Another one, a young company, publishes all its code under an open license. Nobody has an up-to-date overview.
This map gives it. Each dot is an observability player, placed on the city of its headquarters. The colour shows its family: full platform, storage engine, collection pipeline, AI observability, eBPF and profiling, infrastructure monitoring, incident management and AI for operations, Kubernetes and cloud native. A click opens its card: the country and therefore the applicable law, the year it was founded, the model (open source or proprietary, with the license), the delivery mode, native OpenTelemetry support, hosting in the European Union, published certifications and the group it belongs to. From the card you can add the player to a comparison (up to three, side by side below the map) or report a correction.
Comparison
Open a card and choose “Add to comparison” to compare up to three players side by side.
The video sums up the map in a minute and a half; the text below details the figures.
Read the video text
Which law does your observability tool operate under?
Leadership asks for “sovereign” observability. First question: where is the vendor headquartered, today?
140 observability players, placed on the city of their headquarters. Vendors, clouds and startups, across 19 countries.
87 are headquartered in the United States. US law applies to them, wherever the data is hosted.
Langfuse and Polar Signals were born in Berlin. Onum, in Madrid. Traceloop and Lumigo, in Tel Aviv. All of them joined a group headquartered in the US.
21 changes of owner since 2024, 11 of them in 2026. An acquisition changes the applicable law overnight.
Before signing, three questions. The map gives the first answers, with sources.
Which law does your parent company operate under? (today, not at the last tender)
Where is my data and who can access it? (support included)
How do I get my data back if I leave? (in OTLP or an open format)
Players map: headquarters, applicable law, open source, OTLP, acquisitions. meantimetolearn.com/en/tools/observability-map.
Music: “Radar Focus”, Blue Saga (Epidemic Sound).
In this selection of 140 players across 19 countries, 87 are headquartered in the United States and 57 were founded since 2018. Several were born elsewhere, then came under the control of a group headquartered in the US: Langfuse and Polar Signals, founded in Berlin; Onum, founded in Madrid; Traceloop and Lumigo, born in Tel Aviv. In all, 21 of the players shown have changed owner since 2024, 11 of them in 2026.
In Europe, the map shows infrastructure and uptime monitoring vendors (Centreon, Checkmk, Icinga, Paessler, Pandora FMS, ServicePilot, Zabbix, Healthchecks.io, Hyperping, UptimeRobot), the services of two French clouds (OVHcloud and Scaleway), SUSE Observability in Luxembourg and a generation of young companies: Agenta, LangWatch and Giskard for AI, Tenzir for pipelines, Steadybit for chaos engineering, OpenReplay for session replay, ilert for on-call management.
Outside Europe and the United States, the map includes the Chinese clouds (Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud) and APM vendors little known in Europe yet long established at home: WhaTap, JenniferSoft and EXEM in South Korea, Tingyun and Bonree in China, Hinemos and Mackerel in Japan, Raygun in New Zealand, OpServices in Brazil, Auvik and Obkio in Canada. The three large American clouds are on it too, with their observability service: their headquarters matter as much as a specialist vendor’s. These figures describe the selection, not the whole market: it will grow with corrections and suggestions.
The timeline and the table list the completed acquisitions among the players on the map, most recent first, with the announcement that proves each one. They answer a simple question: did the law that applies to the tool you use change with its owner?
One dot per acquisition, coloured by family. Hover a dot for the names.
For a first list of tools a team can run in-house without depending on a vendor’s headquarters, tick “Open source core” and “Self-hostable”: see this selection. The “Headquarters moved by an acquisition” filter draws, for each player concerned, the path from its original city to its current headquarters.
The headquarters tell you which law the company operates under. A company headquartered in the United States remains subject to US law, including for data hosted in Europe. That is only a first criterion. Observability and sovereignty covers the others: where data is hosted, the flows that leave the platform, control of the encryption keys and reversibility.
“Open source core” means the main product is published under a license named on the card. Some licenses, called source-available, let you read and run the code with restrictions: the card gives the exact license name so everyone can judge. “Native OTLP” means the official documentation describes sending OpenTelemetry data directly, without conversion by a third-party component.
“Hosting in the EU” means the documentation of the SaaS offer describes a European Union region the customer can choose. It says nothing about access from abroad, for support for example. Certifications are listed only when the vendor or the certifying body publishes them; their scope (one offer, one region, the whole company) is given when it is narrower. A certification missing from a card is not necessarily missing: it simply was not found on an official page.
It does not rank players or recommend anyone. It gives no prices and no funding amounts: these figures change fast and are hard to verify. It is not exhaustive: it covers 140 players, chosen to cover every family and every region, from large vendors to the startups you meet at KubeCon.
The inclusion rule is the same for everyone: a publicly available observability product, sold by a company with an identifiable headquarters. Foundation projects (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) are not on it: they have no headquarters; the companies that distribute them do.
For technical teams: where the data comes from
Every card was checked on primary sources: the legal or contact page of the official website for the entity and its headquarters, the LICENSE file of the official repository for the license, the official documentation for OTLP ingestion, the official press release for an acquisition. Only the founding year may come from a secondary source when no primary source exists. Anything that could not be checked is marked “not verified”.
The data lives in a single file in the site repository, src/data/actors.json, one player per entry with its sources. The base map comes from Natural Earth (public domain); the map is drawn in the page, with no external mapping service.
The same data can be downloaded as CSV, one row per player, for a spreadsheet or a procurement tool. Each card has its own address: opening a card adds its identifier to the page address (for example #player-zabbix), which can then be shared.
