Observe

Cloud Observability / Monitoring Softwareobserveinc.com

Observe, founded in 2017, provides an AI-powered observability platform unifying logs, metrics, traces, and LLM monitoring, built on a proprietary context graph and Snowflake-backed data lake for enterprise engineering and SRE teams. Acquired by Snowflake in January 2026 for approximately $1 billion.

Company typePrivate
Founded2017
HeadquartersSan Mateo, United States
Headcount101–250
GTM typeB2B
OfferingSoftware

What Observe does

Observe, Inc., founded in 2017 by former leaders of Snowflake, Splunk, Wavefront, and Roblox, provides an AI-powered observability platform that unifies log management, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and LLM observability in a single system. The platform is built on two proprietary architectural components: the O11y Context Graph, which structures logs, metrics, and traces as semantically related entities using incremental views and token indexes, and the O11y Data Lake, which stores telemetry in Apache Iceberg tables with 10x compression on low-cost cloud storage (~$0.0023/GB/month). Native construction on Snowflake's database layer underpins the cost and performance claims, including 13-month default data retention and 400+ pre-built integrations across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. AI capabilities center on the AI SRE product and the O11y Investigator agentic system, which together enable natural-language incident investigation, autonomous root-cause analysis, and CI/CD deployment validation.

Observe firmographics

Firmographics

Name: Observe
Legal name: Observe, Inc.
Website: https://observeinc.com
Company type: Private
Founded year: 2017
Operating status: Acquired
Headcount range: 101–250 employees
Short description: Observe, founded in 2017, provides an AI-powered observability platform unifying logs, metrics, traces, and LLM monitoring, built on a proprietary context graph and Snowflake-backed data lake for enterprise engineering and SRE teams. Acquired by Snowflake in January 2026 for approximately $1 billion.
Ownership category
akta.pro rank

Observe industry classification

Industry

Product category: Cloud Observability / Monitoring Software
NAICS: Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (51821)
SIC: Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
akta.pro primary industry: Distributed Tracing (HDABAJAD)

Keywords

Cloud observability platform
AI-powered SRE
Log management software
Application performance monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring

Where Observe is headquartered

Location

Headquarters

HQ city: San Mateo
HQ country: United States
HQ region: North America

Offices4 records

Markets served

Observe business model

Business model

GTM type: B2B
Offering type: Software
Cost components: Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

Observability Platform Subscription: SaaS subscription for AI-powered observability platform. Pricing based on data ingestion, storage, and compute usage. Customers pay for data volumes ingested, acceleration costs, and query-related expenses.
Usage-based Pricing: Usage-based pricing model aligned with data lake economics. Storage costs approximately $0.0023/GB per month (based on Amazon S3 pricing). Acceleration costs typically ~50% of total bill, queries ~20%.

Pricing tiers

Model	Billing	Price
Usage-based	Pay-as-you-go	Usage-based SaaS model with free trial

Go-to-market motion3 records

Distribution channels4 records

Marketing channels5 records

Observe product offering

Product offering

Core offering

Observe provides an AI-powered observability cloud platform that unifies logs, metrics, and traces into a single system built on an O11y Context Graph and O11y Data Lake architecture. The platform enables engineering and SRE teams to ingest, query, and correlate telemetry data for incident investigation and root-cause analysis. It is sold as a SaaS subscription with usage-based pricing aimed at enterprise engineering organizations.

Product overview

Observe is an AI-powered observability platform offering a unified solution that combines log management, application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and LLM observability. The platform is built on a proprietary architecture comprising the O11y Context Graph for semantic data relationships and the O11y Data Lake for cost-effective storage. Core capabilities include AI SRE (AI Site Reliability Engineer) for automated troubleshooting, Trace Explorer for distributed trace analysis, and comprehensive monitoring across cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes, and 400+ integrations. Following Snowflake's acquisition in January 2026, Observe operates as a product within Snowflake's AI Data Cloud, offering native integration with Snowflake while maintaining its observability-focused feature set including the Observe Agent, MCP Server for AI agent connectivity, and specialized LLM Observability for AI workload monitoring.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Brands

AI SRE: AI-powered Site Reliability Engineering tool that automates telemetry data analysis, root cause identification, and remediation suggestions for faster incident resolution.
Hubble
O11y Context Graph
O11y Data Lake
Observe by Snowflake

Products and services

Observe Platform

Quantifiable outcome

10x faster issue resolution (MTTR)
+6 more outcomes

Companies that use Observe

Customer profile

Named customers10 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Observe technology and API

Technology

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API: Yes
API docs
API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration33 records

AI capability8 records

Feature14 records

Observe partnerships and signals

Strategic signal

Partnerships

Five partnerships are on record, tiered core.

OpenTelemetrycoreTechnology or IntegrationOpenTelemetry is the open-source standard for telemetry data collection that Observe supports natively. Observe's platform uses OpenTelemetry for vendor-neutral data collection, avoiding vendor lock-in for customers. This partnership enables broad compatibility with observability instrumentation across languages and frameworks.
Apache IcebergcoreTechnology or IntegrationApache Iceberg is the open table format used by Observe's data lake for storing telemetry data. Iceberg enables open data formats that avoid vendor lock-in and enable data reuse across use cases (observability, security, compliance) from the same underlying dataset.
OpenAIcoreTechnology or IntegrationObserve's AI capabilities leverage large language models from providers like OpenAI for AI SRE functionality. The O11y Investigator uses AI agent workflows similar to OpenAI's approach to tool-augmented AI, enabling AI to call functions and interact with observability data.
AnthropiccoreTechnology or IntegrationObserve's AI SRE productivity analysis methodology was based on Anthropic's research approach for estimating AI productivity gains. Observe used Claude models for time estimation in their productivity study, and Anthropic's research methodology informed their AI assessment framework.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)coreTechnology or IntegrationObserve's data lake is built on Amazon S3, enabling 10x compression and low-cost storage at approximately $0.0023/GB/month. AWS integrations include AWS-at-scale data ingestion, autodiscovery, and comprehensive monitoring capabilities.

Scale indicators10 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Observe competitors and assessment

Company assessment

Direct peers

Elastic: Elastic (ELK Stack) provides search-powered log analytics and observability, and is explicitly named as a displacement target on Observe's website, making it a directly comparable incumbent.
Honeycomb.io: Honeycomb is an observability platform focused on high-cardinality event data and trace analysis for engineering teams, comparable in serving developer-led, debug-driven use cases overlapping with Observe's context-graph approach.
Datadog: Datadog is the leading cloud-native observability platform offering unified infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, and security on a SaaS model serving the same enterprise engineering buyers as Observe.
Splunk: Splunk is the legacy index-based log analytics and observability incumbent that Observe explicitly targets for displacement with cost-efficient data-lake architecture and AI-native correlation.
Dynatrace: Dynatrace offers an enterprise observability and AIOps platform with automated root-cause analysis, competing directly with Observe's AI SRE positioning and large-enterprise sales motion.
New Relic: New Relic provides a unified APM, infrastructure, log, and browser monitoring platform on a consumption-based model, directly comparable to Observe's logs/metrics/traces bundle and SaaS delivery.
Grafana Labs: Grafana Labs is the open-source observability stack (Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo) competing on open-standards telemetry and cost — the same wedge Observe pursues via OpenTelemetry and Apache Iceberg.
Sumo Logic: Sumo Logic is a SaaS log analytics and observability platform serving enterprise DevOps and security teams on a usage-based model, competing with Observe on similar telemetry pipelines and customer segments.

Emerging players

Chronosphere: Chronosphere is a cloud-native observability platform targeting cost-controlled metrics with M3-based architecture, positioned similarly to Observe for enterprises seeking alternatives to legacy indexing tiers.
Sentry: Sentry is an application error monitoring and performance platform that overlaps with Observe's APM/trace debugging capabilities for engineering teams, though it focuses more narrowly on error tracking than full-stack observability.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

Observe financial estimates

Financial estimate

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Observe leadership team

Management profile

Number of profiles

Profiles6 records

Observe funding detail

Funding detail

Funding overview

Funding rounds7 records

Investors7 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Observe M&A and investment

M&A and investment

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Observe

What does Observe do?

Is Observe a public or private company?

Observe is a private company. It is currently acquired.

When was Observe founded?

Observe was founded in 2017. It employs 101 to 250 people.

Where is Observe based?

Observe is headquartered in San Mateo, United States, in the North America region.

How does Observe make money?

Two revenue lines are on record. Observability Platform Subscription is the primary driver. The others are usage-based Pricing.

Who are Observe's main competitors?

Direct peers on record are Elastic, Honeycomb.io, Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana Labs and Sumo Logic. Emerging players are Chronosphere and Sentry.

Does Observe have an API?

Yes. Observe provides a public REST API accessible at https://docs.observeinc.com/ for managing service accounts, creating reference tables, and integrating with external systems. The API supports programmatic access to Observe's observability data and configuration capabilities. Developer documentation is at docs.observeinc.com.

What industry is Observe in?

Observe's product category is Cloud Observability / Monitoring Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDABAJAD, Distributed Tracing. Its NAICS code is 51821 and its SIC code is 7370.