August 2024 Summaries

Observe's Service Explorer, now generally available, offers a robust, OpenTelemetry-native solution for managing and troubleshooting microservices, distinguishing itself from traditional Application Performance Management tools. It provides automated service maps, dashboards, and health views, which utilize OpenTelemetry data to offer real-time insights into service performance and communication flows. Key features include the ability to correlate service health with deployments and Kubernetes infrastructure, identify upstream and downstream dependencies, and facilitate root cause analysis through interactive views of logs and traces. The platform supports flexibility and scalability through its OPAL data-processing language, enabling custom dashboards and service maps that incorporate diverse data sources beyond OpenTelemetry. Additionally, its industry-leading 13-month trace retention and architecture built on a data lake enhance both data analysis and economic efficiency, offering a comprehensive tool for teams to align around service health and customer satisfaction.

Observe has announced the public preview of Observe For Snowflake (O4S), a solution designed to enhance observability for organizations using Snowflake by collecting and analyzing telemetry data. The company aims to help customers leverage new Snowflake Trail features by providing a centralized platform for collecting logs, metrics, and traces, thus improving the customer experience. O4S simplifies accessing ACCOUNT_USAGE views, enabling operations teams to address security, performance, and availability concerns. The development of O4S involved collaborating with customers to model Snowflake Observability practices across three milestones: Basic Monitoring, Platform Observability, and App Observability. The app is designed to adapt as users integrate more Snowflake services, offering insights through features like Trace Explorer and dashboards such as "Snowflake Login Statistics." This security-focused dashboard has proven popular among early users, providing detailed insights into account activity and security posture. The app is available free on the Snowflake marketplace, and new users are encouraged to sign up for a free trial through Observe's platform.

In August 2025, a new feature was introduced allowing users to build reference tables by uploading a CSV via the Add Data function to provide valuable business context often missing from standard logs, metrics, and traces. This enhancement addresses challenges in rapidly understanding business impacts during incidents, as critical data like customer names and product details are usually external to EC2 instances or Kubernetes clusters. By enriching telemetry data with external business context, such as customer and product lists, users can create Resource datasets for ephemeral associations or use reference tables for enduring associations like Product or Employee IDs. The blog post uses the OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop as an example to demonstrate how reference tables can quickly estimate revenue loss from a failing checkout service by integrating product names and prices into machine data. The enriched Container Logs dataset allows for swift calculation of revenue loss during an incident, providing insights into the business impact. Users are encouraged to explore this feature through Observe's documentation, API reference, and Terraform, with a free trial available for firsthand experience.