Observability Platform Company Observe Secures $50 Million

By Dan Anderson • Oct 12, 2023

Observe – a SaaS observability company reinventing the way machine-generated data is stored, managed and analyzed – recently announced Hubble, its biggest and most innovative product release to date. The company also announced a $50 million Series A3 funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, bringing total funding raised to date to $164.5 million.

Hubble improves user productivity with a revamped Explorer interface, which includes numerous generative AI features, facilitating product help, coding, RegEx generation, incident workflow, etc. And as businesses increasingly become digital, the volume of telemetry data generated by modern distributed applications is exploding. 

Legacy observability and monitoring tools were not designed for these data volumes or the complexity required to investigate unknown problems in production. And as a result, businesses are noticing legacy tool costs are spiraling out of control and mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) rise.

Hubble enables users to discover things they could never see before at a scale previously thought impossible. And New Explorer interfaces to logs and metrics simplify the onboarding experience for new users and now feature a ‘Live’ mode enabling data to be queried in 20 seconds or less from the time it was created. Embedded within the new explorers are generative AI features that improve productivity by 20% to 50% depending on the experience of the user. The new AI features in the product now include:

1.) O11y GPT Help – An in-product chatbot assistant that responds to natural language inquiries from the user about Observe capabilities, ‘how-to’ tasks or error messages.

2.) O11y GPT Extract – A RegEx generation tool that parses data to add structure to logs on-the-fly. With O11y Extract, users never have to write a RegEx again.

3.) O11y GPT Slack Assistant – O11y GPT as an assistant embedded into Slack helping users troubleshoot issues and summarize threads for incident response.

4.) OPAL Co-Pilot – An assistant that generates OPAL code – Observe’s query language – in response to natural language inputs e.g. // extract ip_address from log.

Nearly all users currently analyze their observability data within Observe. And Hubble expands the range data access options, including a supported Public API; a Command Line Interface (CLI); export to CSV; and data sharing to Snowflake so users can do further analysis using their Business Intelligence tool of choice.

Observe helps users get up and running in minutes via Observe Apps – pre-built packages of content containing Observe’s opinion on how to observe specific environments. And with Hubble, users now have access to new apps for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB Atlas, Prometheus, OpenAI, Threat Intelligence, Security Onion and Orca Security.

Observe has doubled employee headcount in the past year, ingests almost 200 TB of data per day and has already surpassed its new annual contract value (ACV) plan for 2023, which includes contracts with Topgolf, F5 and Reveal Data.

KEY QUOTES:

“We’ve always viewed observability – first and foremost – as a data problem. To troubleshoot unknown problems, users need immediate access to relevant contextual data. And they need to be able to afford to retain and analyze that data a year or more. Observe has a modern architecture. All the data is in one place, we derive relationships within it and because we separate storage and compute, it’s stored economically for however long the customer needs it.”

  • Jeremy Burton, CEO, Observe

“Observe has taken a unique approach to observability and we’re very pleased at their progress in the last year. Customers are starting to realize that old tools can’t solve new problems and everyone will need to re-architect over the next few years. The market opportunity ahead for Observe is vast.”

  • Mike Speiser, managing partner, Sutter Hill Ventures