May 2022 Summaries

Observe is a comprehensive data observability tool that enables users to consolidate and manage all their data efficiently, making it a highly valuable resource for organizations like Blooma. With its pay-as-you-go pricing model and flexible data management approach, Observe aligns its incentives with customer needs, thereby turning them into strong advocates. Jason Huling, Director of Technical Operations at Blooma, highlights how Observe has streamlined their DevOps processes by serving as a single source of truth for everything from application logs to infrastructure changes, which has been particularly beneficial for compliance and security-related tasks. The platform's ability to connect diverse datasets seamlessly allows for enhanced visibility and quicker incident triage, offering a cost-effective solution compared to managing multiple tools. This integration not only simplifies tool management but also facilitates operational efficiencies, making Observe a central part of Blooma's observability strategy.

Observe has recently experienced significant growth, fueled by new funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Madrona Ventures, and new investor Capital One, bringing the total funding to over $114.5 million. The company has expanded its customer base, data intake, and employee headcount while enhancing its product offerings with features like Universe Maps, improved metrics and alerting systems, and a new app installation interface. The platform's OPAL query language has been upgraded with new features to aid data processing, and the company continues to focus on efficient usage-based pricing to provide cost savings for customers. Observe is committed to evolving its observability platform to address the complexities of distributed systems and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), offering a range of integrations and a flexible metric expression builder that simplifies the process of managing metrics and alerts. The recent updates and efficiency improvements are designed to maximize the value and usability of the platform for its users.

Observe, a data company, has expanded significantly, growing from 20 to nearly 50 customers and increasing its number of monthly active users fivefold. The company has ingested over 10 petabytes of data, averaging 40 terabytes daily, and retains data for 13 months, enhancing its observability capabilities. By executing 2.5 million queries daily, equivalent to 1% of Snowflake's daily volume, Observe transforms machine-generated data into a graph of connected datasets, providing immediate context for incidents and investigations. Recent advancements include visualization of dataset graphs and context-sensitive dashboards, as well as enhanced integration with environments like Kubernetes and AWS. Supported by investors such as Sutter Hill Ventures and Capital One Ventures, Observe employs a usage-based pricing model, allowing customers to scale their data usage cost-effectively. Looking ahead, the company plans to enhance tracing visualizations and support for OpenTelemetry data, signaling innovation in distributed tracing.

The "OPAL Verb of the Month" series introduces readers to the OPAL language's essential verbs and functions, starting with the fundamental "filter" verb, which is crucial for sorting through unnecessary data in troubleshooting or data modeling. The filter verb returns a dataset that matches specified conditions, making it an efficient first step in OPAL scripts. This verb is accelerable, meaning it performs consistently regardless of the query time window size, enhancing the speed of subsequent queries when combined with other accelerable statements. The filter verb accepts one argument, which can be a Boolean expression, space-delimited string, or regular expression, and provides various methods for matching data, including full-text searches and JSON field matching. The text emphasizes the importance of understanding these filter operations for efficient data handling and encourages users to explore further examples and documentation to deepen their understanding of OPAL.