What Is Data Observability?

Chapter 3. Conclusion: The Benefits of Data Observability

A data observability platform helps IT and data teams detect and stop the propagation of data incidents by tracking and measuring data usage performance across systems, projects, and applications in real time. With a data observability platform, it’s much easier to find and fix the root cause because you have:

• Better visibility into how data is being collected, copied, and modified by any application

• The ability to leverage lineage and historical data information to find the initial cause

• The ability to detect anomalies based on historical data information, which is particularly useful in AI/ML applications

In addition, a data observability platform can facilitate better communication across teams and organizations because it provides you with evidence-based information on your data management ecosystem.

You can also use a data observability solution preventatively to observe issues before they occur. You can do this by:

• Logging context and runtime information from within the application code

• Defining quality control rules and thresholds to anticipate data issues

• Validating rules before and continuously in production to generate notifications about specific data events and their context

• Reviewing or refactoring your delivery upon triggered rules

As organizations continue to scale their use of data, they must actively work to become data incident–resilient. Otherwise, data issues will snowball and so too ...