Observe Inc., the developer of an application observability platform with a built-in chatbot, today disclosed that it has closed a $115 million investment led by Sutter Hill Ventures.

Snowflake Ventures participated as well along with Capital One Ventures and Madrona Ventures. Observe says it closed the Series B round at a valuation 10 times higher than what it was worth after its previous round. According to TechCrunch, the company’s new valuation is between $400 million and $500 million.

Observe provides a cloud platform that can analyze the diagnostics data generated by a company’s applications and use it to detect technical issues. The software can, for example, spot if an e-commerce platform’s checkout page goes offline. After Observe identifies a technical issue, software teams can use a set of built-in troubleshooting tools to find the root cause.

Analyzing applications’ diagnostics data, or telemetry, can be difficult because engineers must take into account when the data was created. For example, identifying what caused a series of outages in January requires retrieving the logs generated during that month. Observe says accounting for the time-dependent nature of telemetry is difficult with traditional analytics tools.

The company has equipped its observability platform with a custom query language, OPAL, to address the challenge. Observer says that the syntax automates many of the time-related tasks involved in analyzing telemetry. An OpenAI-powered chatbot, O11y, provides users with guidance on how to use OPAL and related Observe features.

Software teams can also interact with their data through a drag-and-drop interface. Observe turns applications’ logs, metrics and traces into charts that highlight key information such as workload latency. A feature called Live Mode makes it possible to visualize newly generated data points immediately after they’re ingested, which helps administrators more quickly catch technical issues.

Under the hood, Observe pools the telemetry it collects in a data lake. It organizes the telemetry in a graph, a data structure that makes it possible to create links between related pieces of information. Those links make it easier for administrators to find information about a technical issue during troubleshooting.

Thanks to its graph-based data lake, Observe can not only provide an overview of a given malfunction but also list the systems it affects. For added measure, the platform estimates technical issues’ urgency to help engineers prioritize their remediation efforts. It can retain the information it ingests for over a year, which allows users to analyze malfunctions in the context of any similar incidents that may have occurred previously. 

“Observe has proven that it is possible to treat all telemetry data – logs, metrics, traces, and anything else – simply as events and store them in one consolidated database,” Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Burton wrote in a blog post. “It is possible to have one language to shape and manipulate that data.”

Observe says its newly announced funding round follows a year in which its annual recurring revenue grew by 171%. The company’s net retention rate, a metric that measures how existing customers increase their spending over time, jumped 174%. It plans to grow its sales team following the investment to maintain its revenue momentum.

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