Software-as-a-service observability specialist Observe Inc. said today it has closed on a $50 million early-stage round of funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures, bringing its total amount raised to date to $164.5 million.

The Series A round was announced alongside the launch of Hubble, a new version of its main observability suite that’s said to improve productivity with a revamped user interface and the introduction of generative artificial intelligence features. The generative AI features are designed to assist with product help, coding tasks, incident workflows and more besides.

Observe is an appropriately named startup founded in 2020 that provides companies with the extensive tools needed to monitor the health of SaaS applications. It does this by pulling data from application logs, metrics, traces and events, analyzing that data, notifying teams of any problems and also tracing the root cause so those issues can be resolved faster.

Whereas many observability platforms are more focused on log analytics, infrastructure monitoring and performance management, Observe is more focused on the analysis of telemetry data, bringing it into a single platform where it can be better observed. That’s necessary, the startup explains, because legacy monitoring and observability tools are not designed to handle the massive volume of information generated by modern applications.

With the launch of Hubble, Observe says, it’s now able to discover things that could never be seen before at a scale many would have thought impossible. Through Hubble’s Explorer UI, users can access a new “Live” mode within Observe’s platform that allows data to be queried within 20 seconds or less of the time it was created.

“We’ve always viewed observability — first and foremost — as a data problem,” explained Observe Chief Executive Jeremy Burton. “To troubleshoot unknown problems, users need immediate access to relevant contextual data.”

Observe now also offers a number of generative AI tools that it says will help users dig into this data, including O11y GPT Help, which is a chatbot assistant that can respond immediately to natural language questions from users. As an example, it can explain all of Observe’s features and capabilities, how to perform different tasks, and what error messages mean.

A more compelling tool is O11y GPT Extract, which is able to parse data to add structure to application logs on the fly, reducing the time it takes to create “regular expressions” in order to match text against a user-specified pattern.

Meanwhile, O11y GPT Slack Assistant is embedded directly into the popular collaboration tool Slack, where it can help to troubleshoot problems and summarizes threads to aid in incident response. Lastly, the new OPAL Co-Pilot is a generative AI assistant that helps by generating code in OPAL, Observe’s native query language, in response to natural language inputs and prompts.

Observe said the Hubble release adds more options for data access, with users able to choose from a public application programming interface and a command-line interface, and they can export data to a CSV file and share their data with Snowflake, where deeper analysis can be performed.

Users can also deploy Observe’s observability capabilities through Observe Apps, which are prebuilt packages that make it simple to monitor specific environments, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB Atlas, Prometheus, OpenAI and Orca Security.

Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Partner Mike Speiser said he’s backing Observe due to its unique approach to observability, which sets it apart from rival platforms. “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,” Speiser said. “The market opportunity ahead for Observe is vast.”

Observe said that starting today, users can access its platform for free through a self-service trial, where they’ll be able to explore its full functions and even upload their own data.

Image: Observe