Apple acquired observability platform SigScalr as the tech giant looks to expand its telemetry talent base across the U.K. and U.S.

The deal was revealed by a filing on the European Commission (EC) website, with Apple declaring it would acquire certain assets of SigScalr and hire some of its employees through an unnamed subsidiary.

With the acqui-hire, Apple will own SigLens, SigScalr’s single-binary database for logs, metrics, and traces. The platform supports OpenTelemetry ingestion, Elastic, and Loki formats, plus Splunk HTTP Event Collector (HEC) and Splunk SPL and SQL queries.

SigScalr touted its SigLens platform as “[100-times] more effective than Splunk,” in a claim made on its now-archived GitHub repository.

A current job listing for Apple’s London operations describes Apple's observability platform as operating at large scale across geographically dispersed data centers. Its systems run on Linux and Kubernetes, with a provider-agnostic mix of open source, vendor-licensed, and internally developed tools.

The London position is for a site reliability engineer to cover observability for customer-facing services such as iCloud; a similar role from May saw Apple looking to support its Apple Pay services.

Dated to March, Apple’s SigScalr acquisition was revealed by the EC following its four-month publication policy. Companies are mandated to declare acquisitions and other relevant information under the Digital Networks Act (DNA).

Financial details of the deal were not revealed in the disclosure.

From Salesforce to SigScalr

SigScalr was founded in 2021 by former Salesforce architect Kunal Nawale. Headquartered in Nashua, New Hampshire, it emerged from stealth in February 2024 with $1.76 million in pre-seed funding.

Its SigLens architecture uses micro-indexes and dynamic columnar compression to search compressed data while reducing compute and storage requirements.

While Apple is famous for its smartphones and PC software, the company has quietly made some observability acquisitions over the years. These include Tuplejump in 2016, specifically for its FiloDB open-source engine capable of analyzing large quantities of complex streaming data.

It also scooped up British analytics firm Acunu in 2013 and cloud infrastructure platform FoundationDB in 2015 to round out its internal infra and telemetry scope.

At the time of writing, there seem to be no official announcements from SigScalr or its executives regarding the Apple deal. Its website is currently down, while its LinkedIn page is devoid of posts.