Observe raises $50M, adds GenAI to enterprise data visibility tools

San Mateo-based Observe, a startup working to accelerate application troubleshooting and incident resolution with a unified observability cloud, today announced it has raised $50 million in series A3 debt financing, led by Sutter Hill Ventures. The company also debuted the latest version of its platform ‘Hubble’ with new generative AI smarts.

According to Observe, the release brings a revamped interface and gives users generative tools to help with things like product support, coding, RegEx generation, and incident workflows. It can improve the productivity of users of the platform by up to 25%, the company said.

The funding and update come at a time when enterprises are racing to adopt observability solutions that can actively monitor and flag potential software issues, giving them the necessary insights to fix the incident and prevent downtimes (and the associated cost overheads). 

According to Future Market Insights, the market for these solutions is expected to grow from $2.17 billion in 2022 to $5.55 billion by 2032, with a CAGR of over 8%.

Observe’s ‘unified cloud’ for observability

Most enterprise technology stacks today are a web of complex and distributed applications that run aggressively and generate an exponential amount of telemetry spanning logs, metrics and traces.

These data points usually remain siloed, requiring teams to use different tools to put everything together with context and correlations and identify potential incidents. 

This takes time and is not suitable, especially at a time when the application surface is constantly growing. 

Observe — founded in 2017 by executives from Snowflake, Splunk, Wavefront and Roblox — solves this challenge by offering a unified Observability cloud that brings all the data to one place, allowing for faster troubleshooting, incident detection and resolution.

“Observe puts all data in a single, low-cost Data Lake (built on Snowflake) and eliminates silos for logs, metrics and traces. By storing all data in one place, Observe is able to compress data 10x and store it for 13 months, resulting in inexpensive long-term storage,” Jeremy Burton, the CEO of the company, told VentureBeat. 

Once the information is ingested in the data lake, it is curated to form a “data graph” that enables analysis of the information and provides users with relevant context to quickly identify and resolve incidents.

Since its launch, Observe has netted around 60 paying customers, including TopGolf, Edgio, Linedata and Auditboard. Burton also noted that the company’s annual contract value has more than doubled every year since it started selling and the current year is expected to continue that trend.

Standing out with generative AI smarts

While Observe claims to solve a major issue for enterprises, it is not the only one in this space. Well-funded players like Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana and Splunk (recently acquired by Cisco) are also targeting the observability problem with their respective APM and log analytics solutions and introducing new features to gain share in the market.

On its part, Observe claims to be the only one that eliminates silos of logs, metrics and traces by storing everything in a single, low-cost data lake. To further stand out, the company is pushing out the Hubble update which revamps its Explorer interface for logs, metrics and traces and adds new generative AI features.

This includes an in-product chatbot assistant that responds to queries about Observe’s capabilities, ‘how-to’ tasks or error messages as well as a RegEx generation tool that parses data to add structure to logs on the fly. 

Beyond this, the interface will also include a co-pilot to generate the OPAL code – Observe’s query language – in response to natural language inputs, a dedicated assistant for troubleshooting via Slack and a new ‘live’ mode enabling data to be queried in 20 seconds or less from the time it was created.  

“Hubble also features improved scalability and performance. With this launch, Observe is now capable of ingesting over one petabyte of data per day into a single instance,” Burton said. He added that the funding from this round will help the company grow its sales team to meet the accelerating demand for a modern approach to observability. 

By the end of 2024, he expects to grow the team headcount from 150 to 250 employees.