The Observability Cloud

What do you like best about the product?

What I like about Observe is the potential to make troubleshooting easier while keeping costs down. The AI capabilities are interesting, but I think the real value is how quickly teams can identify and resolve issues without having to jump between multiple tools. Of course, that depends on how well it performs in practice.

What do you dislike about the product?

One thing I don't particularly like about Observe is the learning curve. I understand that observability is inherently complex, but if you're building a tool that's supposed to make troubleshooting easier, why does it take so much effort to get comfortable using it? The whole point should be to reduce complexity, not introduce another layer of it. I shouldn't need to spend hours understanding how the platform organizes and connects data before I can start getting meaningful answers. AI is great sure, but I question how useful they really are if users still need significant technical knowledge to validate what the AI is telling them. For me, a good observability platform shouldn't just be powerful; it should make complicated information easier to understand and act on. Otherwise, we're just moving the complexity from one place to another and calling it innovation.

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

Observe helps address the challenge of having operational data scattered across multiple systems, making it difficult and time-consuming to identify the root cause of issues. By bringing logs, metrics, and traces into one platform, it makes troubleshooting more centralized and gives teams better visibility into what's actually happening. The biggest benefit for me is the potential to reduce the time spent investigating problems. Instead of jumping between different tools and trying to piece everything together, I can get a clearer picture of where things are going wrong. I also appreciate the potential cost savings, especially as the volume of data grows. That said, I think there's still room to improve the learning curve and make the platform more intuitive. A tool designed to simplify troubleshooting shouldn't require so much effort to learn in the first place.

What do you like best about the product?

It makes it easier to turn large amounts of data into clear, actionable insights. I’ve used it before to explore and analyze data, and I particularly liked how intuitive it was to navigate through information, identify patterns, and quickly get to the root of an issue. It helped me spend less time searching through data and more time understanding what was actually happening.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some workflows and configurations can take time to understand. I also found that navigating larger or more complex datasets could sometimes feel less straightforward than expected.

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

At Philip Morris International, I used Observe to help analyze and monitor data related to Consumer Experience and Voice of the Consumer. It helped me bring together large amounts of information, identify patterns and trends, and investigate specific issues more efficiently. This was especially useful when analyzing consumer feedback and experience data, as it allowed me to move from raw data to actionable insights more quickly and support data-driven decisions.

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.