groundcover is expanding its channel strategy after its partner-sourced pipeline grew eightfold over the past year, positioning observability vendors, resellers, cloud providers, and services firms as central to customer adoption and product development.
Partners now generate more than 10% of groundcover’s overall pipeline, according to the company. AWS and Google Cloud referrals account for half of that partner-driven business, up from none a year ago, as groundcover grows its ecosystem across the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and India.
The momentum follows groundcover’s recent $100 million Series C funding round and comes as the company increases investments in partner enablement, co-marketing, and joint solution development.
Partner strategy centers on customer context
John Broad, head of ecosystems at groundcover, told Channel Insider the company is looking for partners that share a customer-first approach and can connect observability deployments to a client’s broader technology and business priorities.
“These are trusted advisors that don’t have just observability as a part of their relationship with the customer, but they’ve got a broader relationship,” Broad said. “They’ve got a deeper relationship understanding the anthropology of the company, as well as their goals and aspirations.”
That context is particularly important for a vendor focused on one segment of the technology stack. Broad said partners can help groundcover understand what customers care about, while groundcover equips those partners to show clients how the platform fits into their environments.
“We certainly don’t expect any partner to, quote, sell for us,” Broad said. “But give us the context that the customer cares about, and then for us to help work with them and validate [that] those are accurate.”
Cost pressure opens higher-value services opportunities
groundcover’s bring-your-own-cloud model deploys the platform’s backend in the customer’s own environment while the vendor manages it as a SaaS-like service. The company combines that architecture with eBPF-based data collection and support for open telemetry standards.
Broad said the model is designed to lower infrastructure costs and help customers retain control of their observability data. It can also shift partner services away from routine maintenance, such as repeated code changes, regression testing, and manual dashboard upkeep.
“We don’t eliminate all professional services,” Broad said. “But what we do is, we allow for those professional services to be focused on providing value, and not sort of the low-margin rote things like maintaining dashboards or doing regression testing.”
The company said partners are using the platform to address telemetry costs, monitor cloud-native and AI workloads, and support hybrid or air-gapped environments. groundcover plans to launch self-paced technical and sales certifications in the third quarter of 2026, followed by an MDF program in early 2027.
Natural-language dashboards target migration friction
Alongside the channel expansion, groundcover is rolling out an updated dashboard experience built around gcQL, its new query language. Natural-language dashboard creation will allow users to describe a dashboard or an individual widget, preview the result, and adjust it without having to build each element manually.
The release also includes pre-built templates, tree map visualizations, configurable SLO thresholds, conditional formatting, widget-level sharing, click-through links, dashboard tags, expanded variable controls, cross-source key mapping, and version history with revert capabilities.
Broad said more than half of groundcover customers are moving away from Datadog, either entirely or partially, often after attempting to control costs. groundcover has developed AI-assisted migration capabilities for monitors, metrics, and dashboards to reduce switching friction and allow customers to run the platforms in parallel during a transition.
Channel partners remain key part of groundcover’s strategy
For channel partners, the new capabilities could support observability migrations, managed monitoring, and AI infrastructure projects, while reducing time spent on dashboard re-creation. Broad said the company’s product roadmap is heavily shaped by customer requests, with partners helping aggregate feedback from across their client bases.
“While we love to take credit for all the ideas, it’s even more fun to be able to say that we do it with our partners and with our customers,” Broad said.
groundcover Dashboards, gcQL, and the newly announced visualization and governance features are available now to customers.