Observe, Inc. Dives Deeper Into Observability

Fresh from picking up an additional $70 million in funding, Observe, Inc. announced this week it has added multiple tools, dubbed Data Universe Maps, to its observability platform to visualize all datasets and surface underlying event data.

The company also added pre-built applications for Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Jenkins environments with editions for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure planned for later this year. Observe Apps are intended to make it easy for IT teams to ingest data that is surfaced via pre-built dashboards that will generate alerts when issues arise.

Finally, Observe, Inc. has added dashboards that provide transparency into its usage-based pricing model. IT teams can now more easily determine how many credits are consumed by both users and specific datasets to help contain costs.

Observe, Inc. CEO Jeremy Burton said those tools are crucial because in the absence of tools to control data costs, most organizations will soon discover that observability is unsustainable.

Of course, it’s not clear yet how many organizations are moving beyond monitoring metrics to embrace observability and launch queries to discover the root cause of performance issues. Many organizations don’t have the level of expertise required to structure such queries. However, as more organizations struggle to investigate and remediate issues impacting customer experience, interest in observability platforms is rising, noted Burton.

Burton said thus far, as a startup, Observe, Inc. has expanded its customer base by a factor of three to now include 50 organizations, which has resulted in a five-fold increase in the number of monthly active users of the platform. The platform is now ingesting more than 40TB of data each day, with more than 25 million queries each day launched across nearly one trillion rows of more than 10 petabytes of data. Capital One is included among the investors in Observe, Inc.

At the core of the Observe platform is a graph engine that makes it simpler to uncover the relationships between machine data that is ingested into the platform.

Going forward, Burton said Observe intends to add support for distributed tracing using the open source agent software created by the OpenTelemetry project that operates under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Change within enterprise IT organizations happens slowly. Many will be using legacy monitoring tools alongside observability platforms for years to come. However, there is an opportunity to rationalize monitoring tools as the capabilities of observability platforms continue to expand.

In the meantime, IT environments will continue to become more complex as more modern applications based on microservices and constructed using containers are deployed. These applications, over time, are generally more resilient than monolithic applications; given all the dependencies between microservices, determining the root cause of a performance issue can be a major challenge. As a result, it may be just a matter of time before this new class of applications ultimately forces the observability issue in the enterprise.