Introduction to Observability

Observability can be a big help when it comes to staying compliant with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS. It captures audit logs, tracks who’s accessing data, and monitors security metrics, creating a clear trail of what’s happening in your systems. This audit trail is crucial for meeting compliance standards, and because observability works in real time, it also helps teams catch any potential compliance issues before they turn into bigger problems.

Absolutely! Observability tools are designed to work alongside the monitoring systems you already have in place. They can pull in data from those systems and add more layers of insights by incorporating additional data like logs, traces, and metrics. This means you don’t have to start an entire infrastructure from scratch—you can build on your existing infrastructure and get even more value out of it.

OpenTelemetry is a game-changer for collecting observability data like logs, metrics, and traces. It’s an open-source standard that makes it easier to gather this data from different systems and applications, no matter what tools you're using. By standardizing the way data is collected, OpenTelemetry helps simplify the data collection process and ensures that everything is consistent, making it easier to integrate observability data across your whole tech environment.