Observe, a startup headquartered in San Mateo, is dedicated to streamlining application troubleshooting and incident resolution through its unified observability cloud platform. Today, the company announced the successful completion of a $50 million Series A3 debt financing round, led by Sutter Hill Ventures. Additionally, Observe unveiled the latest iteration of its platform, named ‘Hubble,’ featuring innovative generative AI capabilities.
Observe’s latest release introduces a revamped user interface and equips users with generative tools to enhance various tasks, such as product support, coding, RegEx generation, and incident workflows. The company claims that these enhancements can boost platform users’ productivity by up to 25%.
This funding and platform update come at a pivotal moment as enterprises are actively seeking observability solutions that can proactively monitor and flag potential software issues. These insights empower them to swiftly address incidents, ultimately preventing downtime and the associated financial losses.
According to Future Market Insights, the market for such observability solutions is anticipated to expand from $2.17 billion in 2022 to $5.55 billion by 2032, exhibiting a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of over 8%.
Observe’s approach to addressing the observability challenge is through its ‘unified cloud’ solution. In today’s complex enterprise technology landscape, which comprises intricate and widely distributed applications generating extensive telemetry data in the form of logs, metrics, and traces, these data points often remain isolated. This necessitates the use of multiple tools to consolidate and contextualize the information, making incident identification and resolution a time-consuming process, particularly in a continuously expanding application environment.
Observe, founded in 2017 by executives with experience at Snowflake, Splunk, Wavefront, and Roblox, resolves this challenge by offering a unified Observability cloud that consolidates all data into a single repository. This approach facilitates faster troubleshooting, incident detection, and resolution.
Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe, explains that the company stores all data in a single, cost-effective Data Lake built on Snowflake, eliminating silos for logs, metrics, and traces. This consolidation enables Observe to compress data by a factor of 10 and retain it for up to 13 months, ensuring cost-effective long-term storage. Once data is ingested into the Data Lake, it is curated to form a “data graph,” enabling comprehensive analysis and providing users with relevant context to quickly identify and resolve incidents.
Since its inception, Observe has attracted approximately 60 paying customers, including prominent names like TopGolf, Edgio, Linedata, and Auditboard. Burton notes that the company’s annual contract value has more than doubled every year since its inception, with the current year expected to continue this growth trend.
While Observe competes in a crowded observability market, it distinguishes itself by eliminating silos of logs, metrics, and traces by centralizing them in a single, cost-efficient data lake. To further set itself apart, the company has introduced the Hubble update, which enhances its Explorer interface for logs, metrics, and traces while incorporating new generative AI features.
These features include an in-product chatbot assistant that responds to inquiries about Observe’s capabilities, offers guidance on tasks, and interprets error messages. Additionally, Observe’s platform now includes a RegEx generation tool for on-the-fly log data structuring. The interface also boasts a co-pilot that generates OPAL code (Observe’s query language) in response to natural language inputs, a dedicated troubleshooting assistant for Slack, and a new ‘live’ mode that enables data querying in under 20 seconds from its creation.
Burton reveals that the Hubble update not only enhances scalability and performance but also allows Observe to ingest over one petabyte of data per day into a single instance. The funding from this financing round will support the company’s expansion efforts, particularly in growing its sales team to meet the increasing demand for modern observability solutions. By the end of 2024, Observe anticipates expanding its team from 150 to 250 employees.
