Snowflake strengthens its cloud platform by integrating Observe for unified telemetry management

In a context where companies seek to optimize the management of their data and strengthen the performance of their cloud infrastructures, Snowflake seizes a major opportunity by integrating Observe into its cloud platform. This acquisition, formalized in early January 2026, marks a significant turning point in how digital players approach telemetry management. Data from logs, metrics, and traces, often scattered and difficult to analyze coherently, can now be centralized on a single interface. This strategic move aims not only to simplify infrastructure monitoring but also to accelerate anomaly detection and resolution through unified management based on open standards. By leveraging robust technologies such as Apache Iceberg and OpenTelemetry, Snowflake intends to offer an enhanced user experience, where artificial intelligence plays a key role in the proactive analysis of complex systems.

This new offering presents itself as an essential lever for companies facing the exponential growth of data flows, especially with the rise of AI agents integrated into modern cloud infrastructures. The integration of Observe thus promises a simplification of monitoring processes, improved visibility into operational performance, and a noticeable enhancement in application performance management. This strategic choice fits within a particularly competitive and fast-growing observability market, where technological innovation is a key differentiating factor.

The origins of Observe and its close connection with Snowflake

Observe was born in 2017 thanks to the joint vision of Jacob Leverich, Jonathan Trevor, and Ang Li. This observability platform quickly positioned itself as an innovative solution based on a technical architecture deeply linked to Snowflake. From its launch in 2018, Observe had integrated a centralized database founded on Snowflake technology, thus facilitating rapid adoption by users eager to optimize the management and analysis of their telemetry data.

The common roots between Observe and Snowflake are all the stronger as they share the same incubator, Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike Speiser, a senior executive at Sutter Hill, even led Snowflake at its inception, creating solid bridges between the two organizations. Jeremy Burton, who has been in charge of Observe for several years, also sits on Snowflake’s board of directors since 2015, fostering technical and strategic synergy between the two entities. This symbiosis has allowed alignment of teams around common objectives and the maturation of technologies developed by Observe in perfect harmony with Snowflake’s expectations.

Observe has convinced the venture capital world, raising nearly 500 million dollars and reaching a valuation of about 750 million dollars by summer 2025. Among the investors are prestigious names such as Snowflake Ventures, Madrona, and Sutter Hill, reinforcing confidence in the project’s strategic viability. This financial solidity paved the way for the official acquisition in 2026, confirming a carefully considered and prepared choice over several years.

A historic partnership turned into a natural integration process

The transition from a collaboration to a full integration follows a natural logic given the evident complementarity of technologies and objectives. With the acquisition of Observe, Snowflake does not merely add a simple tool to its software suite but consolidates its position as the leader of the cloud platform dedicated to data analysis and infrastructure monitoring. The two companies already shared a common technological foundation, which greatly facilitates technical integration and process harmonization.

For Snowflake customers, this integration means access to unified management of telemetry data, whether they come from logs, metrics, or traces. This not only provides better visibility of all systems but also improves performance management and proactive incident detection. The interaction between the Observe and Snowflake teams has refined an offering focused on operational efficiency, where each component enriches the other.

Centralizing telemetry to accelerate performance management

In today’s digital world, telemetry represents a massive volume of detailed information about the health and performance of cloud infrastructures. This data notably includes event logs, performance metrics, and execution traces of applications. The challenge is critical: to standardize and centralize this information to better leverage it.

Thanks to the integration of Observe, Snowflake offers companies a centralized platform where telemetry data is treated as “first-class” data. This means they receive a level of attention and processing equivalent to other critical data stored in the cloud. Clients can thus gather, analyze, and exploit this information at scale, while benefiting from Snowflake’s technological advantages in scalability and rapid access.

This centralization facilitates rapid anomaly detection, for example by identifying weak signals before they become major incidents. Real-time data analysis enables quicker responses, significantly improving service availability and reliability.

Concrete illustration: the case of a large e-commerce company

Imagine an online commerce platform with millions of active users. The services rely on a distributed cloud infrastructure that generates terabytes of telemetry data daily. Without a unified tool, technical teams struggle to analyze these multiple flows from payment systems, inventory management, or customer support.

With the integration of Observe into Snowflake, this company can expand its observation scope, continuously monitor performance via a single interface, detect slowdowns and anomalies, and anticipate outages. This proactive approach reduces downtime, improves customer experience, and optimizes business operations.

Open standards at the heart of the integration strategy

Effective telemetry data management involves a strong adoption of open standards. Snowflake and Observe notably rely on two key technologies: Apache Iceberg and OpenTelemetry. These frameworks provide solid foundations to collect, store, and analyze telemetry flows in an automated and standardized manner.

Apache Iceberg facilitates the management of large data tables in cloud environments, with increased reliability and flexibility. OpenTelemetry standardizes telemetry data collection, whether logs, metrics, or traces, allowing seamless integration with various systems and applications. This orientation towards open source and standards avoids technological lock-in and encourages interoperability.

These building blocks allow IT operations to automate monitoring and carry out audits more quickly and reliably, freeing up time to focus on innovation and proactive problem resolution.

Practical advantages of open source in telemetry management

• Increased interoperability: tools can easily connect with other systems within the cloud infrastructure.
• Adaptation flexibility: teams can customize their data collection according to specific and evolving needs.
• Cost reduction: relying on community solutions reduces maintenance and development efforts.
• Continuous innovation: contributions from developers worldwide accelerate the improvement of underlying technologies.

AI SRE: the new horizon of site reliability with Snowflake and Observe

One of the most innovative elements brought by Observe and eagerly awaited by Snowflake is the AI SRE component, which embodies the futuristic vision of intelligent cloud infrastructure management. Artificial intelligence serving site reliability promises automated processes capable of instantly detecting anomalies, alerting teams, and even proposing remediations.

This model addresses the growing complexity of modern environments, where volumes of logs, traces, and metrics become massive. Supervision by humans alone has become impractical, hence the need to rely on advanced intelligent monitoring systems.

The AI SRE concept is not limited to simple data analysis; it integrates machine learning to anticipate incidents, optimize performance, and influence decision-making. The ultimate goal is a quick return on investment thanks to drastically reduced resolution times and better service availability.

Towards a transformation of roles within IT teams

Site Reliability Engineers can see their work evolve towards more strategic tasks, supported by intelligent tools. Automated alerts and diagnostics allow them to focus on optimization projects, implementing best practices, and collaborating with other departments. This synergy promises to improve the overall efficiency of IT processes.

Economic consequences and strategic impact of the acquisition for Snowflake

The acquisition of Observe by Snowflake is not limited to a purely technological operation; it fits into a long-term economic and strategic logic. According to sources close to the matter, the transaction amount would be close to one billion dollars, thus exceeding the acquisition of Streamlit carried out in 2022. This expenditure reflects Snowflake’s priority to strengthen its operational and observability management capabilities.

In a market for IT operations management software estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, this operation aims to position Snowflake as a key player. It should also strengthen the connection with demanding corporate clients seeking complete, integrated solutions capable of handling the scale of data.

This dynamic offers a ripple effect for the entire ecosystem: technology partners, integrators, as well as client companies can benefit from a cutting-edge platform capable of meeting the current and future challenges of cloud infrastructures. Moreover, Snowflake’s valuation and reputation could emerge strengthened, consolidating its leadership in the Data Cloud AI field.

Summary table of strategic advantages of Observe’s acquisition by Snowflake

Aspect	Advantage for Snowflake	Impact for clients
Unified telemetry management	Strengthens the cloud offering with an integrated platform	Data centralization for simpler and faster analysis
Open standards (Apache Iceberg, OpenTelemetry)	Promotes interoperability and continuous innovation	Integration flexibility with third-party systems
AI SRE (artificial intelligence)	Advanced IT operations automation	Reduction of incident detection and resolution times
Solid financial support	Lower risks related to integration	Confidence in service sustainability

Future perspectives: towards intelligent and predictive observability

The integration of Observe into Snowflake’s cloud platform opens the way to a new era of observability, combining computing power, artificial intelligence, and unified telemetry data management. The next steps should see strengthening predictive capabilities, enabling not only rapid incident responses but also anticipating developments before they become problematic.

This transformation is also supported by Snowflake’s active collaboration with open-source communities and technological innovation initiatives. The goal is to stay at the forefront of market expectations while relying on a robust and scalable foundation. Consequently, users will benefit from increasingly intelligent monitoring dashboards, advanced contextual alerts, and seamless integration with existing performance management tools.

This outlook continues the work initiated by Observe and opens new opportunities for companies seeking to maximize operational efficiency within cloud infrastructure. The unified, open-standards-centered architecture positions Snowflake as an essential catalyst for innovation in data analysis and monitoring.