Observability pipeline software manages and optimizes the flow of telemetry data within IT systems. These solutions assist IT teams in monitoring and securing their infrastructure. Observability pipeline software maintains overall system integrity by seamlessly connecting numerous data sources, analytic tools, and databases.
Observability pipeline software becomes necessary when the cloud infrastructure environment begins to generate large amounts of telemetry data consisting of traces, metrics, and logs. Most of this data is inconsequential and noisy for analytic software to process. In addition, manually transporting this data from various infrastructures and agents is time-consuming. Thus, IT professionals use observability pipeline tools to route raw telemetry data from one API to another in real time. While the data is being routed from origin to destination, the software reformats it for compatibility, reduces its size based on value, and enriches it with additional context to the issues. This allows the infrastructure monitoring and security software to receive and analyze only the necessary data in a digestible format. This ensures operational efficiency for IT Operations, DevOps teams, and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) for continuous infrastructure monitoring.
These IT teams typically integrate observability software with monitoring software. Monitoring software can be both sources and destinations for observability pipelines. Observability pipelines do not usually provide the monitoring and analytics found in observability solution suites. Instead, observability pipeline tools focus on sending the telemetry data to the observability solution suites software.
To qualify for inclusion in the Observability Pipeline category, a product must:
Collect and aggregate various forms of telemetry data like logs, metrics, and traces
Provide data optimization and reduction to reduce the cost of data storage and processing
Support real-time data processing and context enrichment
Route data to analytic tools and storage solutions
Offer custom data filter options and data transformation