The Observability Cloud

What do you like best about the product?

To start, Observe's support team is far beyond any other vendor that I have worked with to date, which includes other top-ranked APM/Logging/Monitoring solutions on G2. They make communication easy; they are very responsive and dedicated to ensuring you are successful with the product.

Observe treats all your custom/bespoke data coming in from arbitrary data sources or 3rd party tooling the same as other more common data sources such as Kubernetes or AWS. All of your data sources and resources feel just as integrated and native to Observe as any other. If you send over data they've never seen, you aren't handicapped until they support it, and you don't need to submit a feature request to have them integrate your data source in a way that feels native.

Within Observe, you can easily model your resources across the various platforms you use. Those platforms and resources can span across EC2 instances, Kubernetes Pods, Terraform runs, CI/CD Builds, JIRA tickets, GitHub commits, and anything else relevant to you. You can then create links/connections between all of these resources and their event streams/logs.

Imagine a scenario where you see an access denied exception when accessing AWS resources in your application logs. From your app logs, you can jump to the Kubernetes Pod for that service and see the IAM Role attached to the pod. From the IAM Role, you review the attached IAM Policy and the CloudTrail events associated with that role to see more details on the failed request and what permissions you need to add to the policy. You can further investigate the change history of the policy, jumping to the Terraform run that last updated the policy, the GitHub commit that triggered the Terraform run, and the JIRA story associated with the code change.

You can genuinely connect everything in Observe, not just logs and not just your typical platforms, and do so in a way that represents your architecture and workflows.

What do you dislike about the product?

My only potential dislike is that they aren't a full-blown APM (yet?). However, as mentioned above, they provide a lot of value beyond what an APM can provide. The foundation of the product seems so solid and flexible that I would not be surprised if they make good progress closing that gap, enough to allow us to dump our APM and solely use Observe.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

AWS likes to spread your logs and event streams all over the place: S3 buckets, Cloudwatch log groups, Kinesis Firehose, etc. All with different, and not very good, ways of accessing the data when needed. It is even worse if you have multiple accounts.

Observe centralizes all of our data from AWS and elsewhere, giving us a single tool that our team needs to learn and a single source of truth for visibility into our environments. This centralization has facilitated easier onboarding of new users and better visibility for operations, security, and compliance. Observe has made all this data easy to find, analyze, and act upon.

What do you like best about the product?

After setting up simple collectors, you now have access to all of your data. You don't need to truncate or parse your logs until they get to the server. You can easily create worksheets and parse your data out. Their team is super knowledgeable and always able to help.

What do you dislike about the product?

The custom language takes a little getting used to, but you can also use right-click utils to do most.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are keeping an eye on our data. Errors that used to not get to us until a user let us know are now getting to our inbox when they happen.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It's simple and growing; we have been more interactive with our logging data than we have in a while.