Observe announced today it has secured $156 million in Series C funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from Madrona Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, and Capital One Ventures.
The infrastructure monitoring and observability vendor has tripled the number of monthly active users on its platform in recent months, and it cites the growing popularity of data lakes among the reasons for the increased interest. Observe’s approach has enterprises moving their telemetry data to data lakes for scalability and cost-efficiency; its Observability Cloud platform ingests enterprise logs, metrics and traces with OpenTelemetry and compresses and stores the data in an open Apache Iceberg format. “It’s not only cheaper, there is no lock in through proprietary formats,” Observe CEO Jeremy Burton wrote in a blog announcing the funding news. “Customers can now own their telemetry data.”
In addition, the company noted that AI is changing the troubleshooting workflow, enabling teams to find and fix problems faster.
“We’ve always believed that observability is a data problem, and we now live in a world where systems are more complex, data volumes are larger, and—with AI—it’s frictionless for users to ask questions,” Burton wrote. “This is a game of analytics, and the observability vendor who can answer the most questions—most accurately—will win.”
Observe is a SaaS platform, and customers deploy Observe agents to collect telemetry data from a variety of sources, including infrastructure such as Kubernetes, databases such as MongoDB or Snowflake, and other applications. The agents collect time-series data, logs, traces/spans, and performance data and send the data to Observe’s platform. Observe then takes the raw telemetry data, curates and normalizes it, and structures it to make it more easily navigable and usable for troubleshooting by customer teams.
“Observe gives us the visibility we need across our cloud environment, helping to reduce our mean time to resolution and operational costs, while enabling our security and infrastructure teams to stay ahead of potential issues,” said Oscar Papel, CISO at Truveta, an Observe customer, in a statement.
Source:: Network World