Software News
Rick Whiting
Observe’s new offering provides a number of new generative AI capabilities that the startup says will boost user productivity for analyzing machine-generated data.
Observability tech developer Observe Inc. has raised $50 in a Series A3 financing round, bringing the startup’s total financing to $164.5 million.
Observe paired the funding news with the launch of Hubble, the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup’s latest product for storing, managing and analyzing machine-generated data.
The new offering includes a completely revamped Explorer interface with a number of generative AI features that facilitate product help, coding, regular expression, incident workflow and other tasks.
Hubble also now provides users with the option to perform data analytics using third-party data analysis tools.
“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,” said Jeremy Burton, Observe CEO, (pictured) in a statement.
“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,” he said.
As businesses increasingly become digital, the volume of telemetry data (including log, trace and metric data) generated by modern distributed applications is exploding. Legacy observability and monitoring tools were not designed for such data volumes or the complexity required to investigate unknown problems in production, according to Observe.
A recent MarketsandMarkets report said the global observability tools and platform market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.7 percent from $2.4 billion this year to $4.1 billion in 2028. Sales are being driven by the growing complexity of IT infrastructure, increased adoption of cloud applications, and the move to DevOps and SRE (site reliability engineering) practices.
The Observe announcements come shortly after the news that Splunk, a major player in the observability platform market, is being acquired by Cisco Systems for $28 billion, a deal expected to be concluded in the third quarter of 2024.
The new Hubble observability platform features a new “Live” mode that makes it possible to query log and metric data within 20 seconds or less from the time it is created.
The product also includes a raft of new generative AI features that Observe says improve productivity by 20 to 50 percent. They include the 011y GPT Help chatbot that responds to natural language inquiries about Observe capabilities, how-to tasks and error messages; the 011y GPT Extract regular expression tool that parses data to add structure to logs on-the-fly; the 011y GPT Slack Assistant embedded in Slack for trouble-shooting issues and summarizing threads for incident response; and the OPAL Co-Pilot assistant that generates code in Observe’s OPAL query language in response to natural language inputs.
Also new are Observe Apps – a series of pre-built packages that include Observe’s guidance on how to observe specific environments. Users now have access to applications for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB Atlas, Prometheus, OpenAI, Threat Intelligence, Security Onion and Orca Security.
While nearly all Observe users today analyze their collected data within Observe, Hubble expands the range of data access options to include the support of public APIs, a command line interface, data exported to an Excel CSV file, and data sharing to the Snowflake platform – all making it easier for performing data analysis using third-party data analytics tools.
The $50 million in Series A3 convertible debt (debt that can be converted into equity) was provided by Sutter Hill Ventures. The company plans to use the additional funding to expand its research and development and sales operations, according to TechCrunch.
“Observe has taken a unique approach to observability and we’re very pleased at their progress in the last year,” said Mike Speiser, a managing partner at Sutter Hill Ventures, in a statement. “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.”
