Observe, Inc. today revamped the Hubble user interface to its observability platform that has been infused with generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Fresh from raising an additional $50 million in funding, Observe CEO Jeremy Burton said as the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform continues to be infused with AI using multiple large language models (LLMs), it’s becoming apparent that observability is rapidly becoming democratized.
Most IT organizations still rely primarily on legacy monitoring tools to track a set of predefined metrics. Observability platforms have arisen to aggregate metrics, logs and traces to enable DevOps teams to launch queries and surface the root cause of performance issues or IT incidents. The challenge is that most observability platforms have required IT teams to master a proprietary query language such as Observe’s RegEx.
However, with the rise of generative AI tools, it is now possible for IT professionals of all skill levels to employ a natural language chatbot to generate a RedEx query, noted Burton. A RegEx generation tool also parses data to add structure to logs on-the-fly, and there is also an OPAL Co-Pilot that generates OPAL code in response to natural language inputs.
The Hubble interface furthers those capabilities by simplifying the onboarding experience anytime there is a new member added to an IT team, he added. Hubble also expands the range of data access options available, including a public application programming interface (API), a command line interface (CLI), export to CSV and data sharing to the Snowflake cloud platform.
IT teams are also coping with an explosion of telemetry data generated by modern distributed applications based on microservices architectures. Legacy observability and monitoring tools were not designed for these data volumes, so when there is an incident, the mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) is increasingly extended. In contrast, the Observe platform now features a ‘Live’ mode that enables data to be queried in 20 seconds or less from when it was created.
Other capabilities include an assistant embedded in Slack to help users troubleshoot issues and summarize threads for incident response.
While it’s still early days as far as the adoption of observability platforms are concerned, there is already no shortage of options. The pending acquisition of Splunk by Cisco next year will cause more organizations to reevaluate their IT management options, so the pace at which organizations are transitioning to cloud-hosted observability platforms should increase, noted Burton. Even after the merger is completed, it might be several more months before Cisco integrates its AppDynamics platform with the observability platforms that Splunk added to its IT operational analytics platform, he added.
In the meantime, IT environments are only going to become more complex. It won’t be feasible for most IT teams to manage highly distributed computing environments without some help from AI. The challenge, as always, will be finding the budget dollars needed to deploy an observability platform before the number of increased IT incidents makes the need for one painfully obvious.