Observe Adds Over 20 Customers In 6 Months

SAN MATEO, Calif., June 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --

News Summary

Today Observe Inc... 

• Will host its second live event showcasing new product features and customer stories. To view the live broadcast visit here, streaming begins at 10 AM PST.
• Announced that since the company launched last October its customer base has expanded to over 20 paying customers composed primarily of technology-focused / SaaS companies.  Two of those customers, Linedata and Top Golf, are featured in today's live event.
• Introduced new product capabilities:
  'Metrics With Context' enables DevOps & SRE teams to immediately access metrics relevant to the service or component they are investigating — no tags required!
  'Alerts With Context' enables DevOps & SRE teams to understand, at a glance, the broader impact of the problem they are seeing e.g. which customers are affected.
  View the product demo here.
• Secured $7M in funding from Madrona Venture Group, led by S. Somasegar, "Soma", for a total of $42M.
• Appointed a new board member, John McMahon, five-time CRO, author of "The Qualified Sales Leader", and board member at Snowflake and MongoDB.

Full Story
Observe Inc. today announced new funding, board appointments, product capabilities, and customers. Observe Inc. was founded in 2017 by Sutter Hill Ventures to capitalize on the emerging opportunity for Observability which promises to supplant the current $20B+ market for Log Analytics, Metrics Monitoring, and Application Performance Management (APM). 

Investors & Board
Today, Observe secured $7M in additional funding from Madrona Venture Group bringing total funding, through Series A, to $42M. Early investors in Observe also include Michael Dell, Frank Slootman, and Scott Dietzen.

"Observe is taking a unique approach to Observability, a practice that all modern enterprises must embrace. Observe leverages cloud-native architectures to deliver near real-time, actionable information in a cost-effective manner. This talented team has a clear path to lead this category and we're excited to support them on this journey," said S. Somasegar, managing director, Madrona Venture Group.

In addition, Observe today welcomed its newest board member, John McMahon. John comes to Observe with over 30 years of corporate sales experience, is a five-time CRO, and author of "The Qualified Sales Leader". John is currently a board member at Snowflake as well as MongoDB, where he was instrumental in developing their enterprise sales teams.

"Since day one we believed Observe had the potential to be a large enterprise SaaS company," said Jeremy Burton, CEO of Observe, "The funding from Madrona Ventures, along with Soma's product experience and the appointment of John McMahon - one of the world's great enterprise sales leaders - to the Observe board are important steps in helping us realize that potential."

New Product Capabilities

Observe has always believed that Observability is a data problem. Event data - logs, metrics, and traces - emitted by applications and infrastructure are siloed and so, when something goes wrong, it's impossible to see the big picture. Observe uniquely brings all event data together into a single, unified, datastore — powered by Snowflake — then curates and relates that event data so users can make sense of it and investigate issues an order of magnitude faster.

Today Observe is introducing new capabilities to deal with metrics, or time-series, data. Incumbent offerings expose to users 100's or 1000's of discrete metrics to monitor or analyze. They also rely on elaborate tagging schemes to view or compare metrics across different components e.g. CPU utilization on many hosts. Cardinality of data — unique combinations of metrics and tags - explodes, driving up costs or breaking tools altogether.

Observe curates metrics data and relates it to things — resources — that users care about. So, when a user looks at Customers, they see metrics related to customers like error rates and response times.  And when a user looks at Kubernetes Pods they see metrics related to Pods like memory usage and restart counts. Observe delivers metrics, with context — the metrics users see always make sense in the context of what they are looking at. No overwhelming lists of metrics, no tagging schemes, and no cardinality issues.

Once users are confident working with metrics the next thing they usually want to do is alert on a specific metric if it exceeds a threshold e.g. response time is greater than one second. Unfortunately, there is often little discipline around alert creation leading to overflowing inboxes and slack channels. Worst case, this all becomes noise, and alerts — some important — are ignored.

Today Observe introduced new capabilities for alerting. Instead of creating alerts on discrete, meaningless, metrics Observe allows users to create alerts on things they care about such as Customers, Pods, Shopping Carts, or Containers. So when an alert fires, the user doesn't just see that response times dropped, they also see which customers were affected. Observe delivers alerts, with context.

New Customers
Since emerging from stealth in October 2020, Observe has acquired over 20 paying customers including Topgolf and LineData.

Topgolf was able to bring a level of visibility to their environment like never before. Ethan Lilly, Engineering Manager at Topgolf, said, "What we've gained with Observe is the ability to link our data in ways that we never could before. Being able to link the data between our microservices, our infrastructure, and ServiceNow...these are things we haven't ever thought of linking before."

This linkage translates into tangible business benefits like faster troubleshooting, more efficient processes, and happier customers.

"Observe is saving us time by allowing us to more quickly resolve escalations — which is better for our guests because nobody wants to sit around waiting for an IT to fix your problem.", says Lilly.

Andrey Budzar, Linedata's Director for AMP Cloud Platform and DevOps, found Observe to be a great tool for auditing, ease of user management, and troubleshooting user-related issues in AWS.

"We have dozens of AWS accounts, but with Observe we can create linkages across these accounts. We can troubleshoot across our multi-account architecture without having to log in to any individual AWS account. This makes it easy for engineers to isolate issues."

Observe's usefulness for Linedata certainly didn't stop there. Budzar also found Observe gives them valuable insight into their application deployment pipelines as well.

"The impact here at Linedata has been tremendous. Our apps are more secure and we release better quality code into production," says Budzar.

Pricing & Availability
Observe's pricing model is based on two components — storing data and querying data. Storage costs reflect current Amazon S3 pricing plus minor charges for processing data on ingest. Querying data consumes "Observe Credits" — when the customer is using Observe and getting value from the product they pay for it, when they are not using Observe they don't pay for it.

Observe is currently offering users "Early Access", please go to www.observeinc.com to register.

About Observe
Observe was founded in 2017 by Sutter Hill Ventures and recruited a world-class founding team with deep experience dealing with vast quantities of data. Jacob Leverich joined the team from Splunk, Jonathan Trevor from Wavefront, Jon Watte from Roblox, and Philip Unterbrunner from Snowflake, via Facebook. More recently, Observe began building out its executive team through Jeremy Burton, who joined as CEO in 2018 from Dell Technologies, and Keith Butler, who joined as CRO from Perfecto in 2020.

Observe's vision is to turn the world's business data into actionable information.

For more information, visit www.observeinc.com, or follow Observe, Inc. on LinkedIn and @ObserveInc on Twitter.

Media Contact: Ross Lazerowitz
[email protected]

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SOURCE Observe Inc