A Focus On SaaS Observability
When businesses move to the cloud, they find themselves dealing with increasingly complex ways of managing and troubleshooting applications. Observe, a San Mateo, Calif.-based startup just emerging from stealth mode, thinks it has the answer in what CEO Jeremy Burton called a new way to handle observability, which is a way to look at the outputs of an application to understand its internal state and from there look at how to troubleshoot it.
Burton, a former top Symantec Veritas and Dell EMC marketing executive who joined Observe about a year after its 2017 founding, told CRN in an exclusive interview that observability is extremely hard to do in a Software-as-a-Service environment. “If a user calls or emails with an issue, that’s going to raise maybe a Zendesk ticket, and that Zendesk ticket is going to be related to maybe some Java or Ruby code, and that Java or Ruby code may be accessed in a MongoDB database, and the Java code and MongoDB be may be running on Kubernetes,which may be running on AWS.”
Observe will be competing with vendors such as Splunk, Datadog, New Relic and others that tackle various aspects of the SaaS observability problem. Observe’s approach is to collect data from all the sources related to keeping SaaS applications running, move the data to Snowflake, and gain full insight into what is needed to make them work, Burton said.
Following is an in-depth look at Observe, the SaaS observability business and more.
