Snowflake to acquire US AI platform Observe

Snowflake has agreed to acquire Observe in a move aimed at expanding its observability features for enterprise customers.

Observe is a US-based company that provides AI-powered observability solutions for IT operations.

Snowflake said the deal will allow its platform to support businesses managing large-scale telemetry data and AI applications.

The company plans to integrate Observe’s technology, which is built using open standards like Apache Iceberg and OpenTelemetry, into its AI Data Cloud.

The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

🔗 Source: Snowflake

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Observe’s rapid growth signals observability cost crisis is deepening

Observe tripled revenue and doubled its enterprise base in the past year, with 180% net revenue retention 1. Many teams switched from Splunk, Datadog, and Elasticsearch to cut rising bills and complexity 1.
The platform handled over 150 petabytes of telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces from applications and infrastructure) 1. Older tools push teams into sampling and short retention windows 2, which creates blind spots in production.
Customers cut troubleshooting time by up to 30% and lowered spend after switching 1. CEO Jeremy Burton called older monitoring players “dead companies walking” because their designs lag today’s needs 3.

OpenTelemetry-to-Snowflake integration creates services opportunity for tech operators

The acquisition sets an open-standard stack on Apache Iceberg (a table format for large analytics datasets) and OpenTelemetry (an open standard for instrumenting and exporting telemetry data) 4. Many current OpenTelemetry–Snowflake links stick to basic metric capture via Telegraf plugins (an open-source metrics collection agent) 5 or receiver settings in the OpenTelemetry Collector (the service that ingests telemetry) 6.
Teams rolling out AI apps face surging telemetry volumes 2. Many integrations cover only simple metric ingestion then miss features Observe offers such as AI site reliability engineering (SRE) plus a unified context graph across logs, metrics and traces (linking related events across data types) 4. That gap fuels demand for migration work, cost governance tools, and OpenTelemetry skills.
Systems integrators plus managed service providers can build offerings around OpenTelemetry data normalization with retention policy tuning. Platform engineering teams can add trace analysis workflows in areas where some Snowflake integrations remain experimental 5. Snowflake’s data platform combined with OpenTelemetry standards opens a young services market before rivals set the pace.