We are excited to announce that Observe on Apache Iceberg™ is now in private preview. Your observability data can now be stored as Apache Iceberg tables in your own Amazon S3 bucket with the full Observe experience running on top. This is part of Observe by Snowflake’s broader commitment to open standards in observability. In addition to using OpenTelemetry-native ingestion, your data now lives in a format any Iceberg-compatible engine can read, in storage that you own and control.
The volume of logs, metrics and traces generated by modern systems has grown dramatically. Leading enterprises now ingest massive amounts of data daily. Yet traditionally that data has almost always lived in a silo — encoded in vendor-specific formats, queryable only through the vendor's interface and inaccessible to the rest of the organization. Engineering teams troubleshoot in one tool while business and data teams work in another, and joining telemetry signals with business data requires ETL, manual exports or a custom pipeline. When your needs outgrow the vendor’s platform, or when you want to run analytics on top of your telemetry, getting that data out is often harder than it should be.
These issues are a consequence of how traditional observability platforms were architected: built to serve a single vendor's interface, with no expectation that the data would ever need to live anywhere else. Open table formats such as Apache Iceberg change that. When your telemetry is stored in Iceberg, it lives alongside the rest of your data, under your control and accessible through the tools your teams already use. This minimizes the need to extract or replicate data into a separate system — and the related costs of that process.
