Observatory · a kinder way to watch your systems
Hey. Production is on fire again, isn't it?
We made a thing for the nights you're holding it together with coffee and a stack trace. Observatory is an observability tool that walks with you through the messy middle, not a dashboard that performs for your manager.
Open source, MIT-flavored, self-host if you like. No card, no demo gauntlet, no sales rep named “Chad” calling you next Tuesday.
Three small promises
We're not here to fix you.
We're here to walk with you.
Tools that act like authorities tend to wear out their welcome. Observatory is built for the long haul. For the way you actually run systems, not the way a marketing deck imagines you do.
We’ll sit with you on the rough nights.
Production has been on fire since 11:47pm and the dashboard you trusted is being weird about it. Observatory was built for that exact hour, with queries that don’t hide the long tail and graphs that don’t lie about it.
We’ll celebrate the boring weeks.
Most of the work is unglamorous. Tagging spans, tightening alerts, asking the same query a hundred different ways. Observatory makes that work feel like care, not chore. And writes it all down for you.
We’ll grow at your pace.
Start with one node and a few services. Add complexity when your team is ready, not when a sales rep tells you it’s time. Observatory’s open-source core is yours forever, and we mean that.
A small daily ritual
Five minutes with your stack,
like a morning walk.
Observatory's morning brief is a single-page summary of what your systems did overnight. Not a wall of charts. Three things that changed, one thing to look at, a gentle nudge if anything is wandering off.
It's the part of the day where you check on the system and the system, gently, checks on you.
See an example briefQuiet night. A few things to know.
- Checkout p99 settled back under 220ms after the deploy at 02:14.
- Search service had two 500s, both retried cleanly. Worth a glance, not a page.
- Disk usage on db-2 is creeping. Probably fine for the week. Take a look Friday?
Observatory ♡
Come hang out for a week.
See if it feels like home.
Observatory's open-source build is one binary, one config file, and a friendly README that doesn't make you scroll for the install command. We mean it about the no-card thing.