Why Observe?

After facing the “Here’s search bar, good luck!” approach to troubleshooting that most vendors provide and becoming disillusioned with that approach, Observe was founded in 2017. Now, most businesses have implemented multiple tools specializing in niche areas such as Infrastructure Monitoring, Log Analytics, or Application Performance Management to collect data. The company then becomes dependent on experts to make sense of the data collected by the different tools.

Observe takes a different approach because Observe fundamentally believes that Observability is a data problem. The essential telemetry data used for troubleshooting is not only highly voluminous and growing at 40% annually, but it’s also almost always fragmented, making it difficult to see how application and infrastructure components relate and impact each other.

Observe ingests all telemetry data, including log events, trace events, a time series, or even a Zendesk ticket. Everything is ingested into a single, unified data store. And, you don’t have to think about the structure of the data as it is ingested because event data can be parsed on-the-fly later.

Then, Observe begins to curate the event data into datasets that are familiar to users. That could be AWS EC2 instances or AWS S3 buckets if the event data comes from AWS CloudTrail, or it could be Pods and Container Logs if the event data comes from Kubernetes. Or, it could even be Customers, Sessions, and Transactions if the event data comes from a custom web application.

Because the datasets live in one database, it’s easy to link them together. For example, Jenkins Builds result in Images, which run inside Containers and run inside Pods. Well, you get the general idea. This is the secret sauce of Observe and critical to providing you with the all-important context you need to troubleshoot problems.

architecture overview

Figure 1 - Observe Architecture

Why is context so important to Observability? Because modern applications are released weekly or even daily, new code runs in production every day. As a user, this means you could see new and unknown problems in production every day. When investigating unknown problems, it is critical that you quickly get your bearings and become oriented with the nature of the problem. Being a click away from more context, and without locating the company “expert” to do it, the root cause can be identified much more quickly.

Observe solves many use cases right out of the box. If you’re observing AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Linux or Windows Hosts, Jenkins, or Github, you hook up your telemetry data using Observe open source agents, and everything lights up. That leaves you to focus on the thing you care about most - your application. Observe makes it simple for you to create custom datasets, relationships, monitors, and dashboards, so you quickly become as savvy observing your application as you are at observing AWS.

Additional information about Observe

Browse our blogs and resources to discover more about Observe and the capabilities of our unique platform for observability.