Data observability involves the complete monitoring, managing, and understanding of the modern data tech stack. These tools allow companies to better manage their data by helping them discover and solve real-time data issues and gain complete insight into the system’s data health. Data observability tools help companies accelerate the adoption of data across departments. This helps in making strategic and data-driven decisions that benefit the entire organization.
The concept of data observability stems from best practices learned from DevOps software to manage impartial, inaccurate, or erroneous data. These best practices, which include optimizing logs, real-time insights, and so on, enable the creation of error-free and trusted data across the entire data stack, which includes data sources, data warehouses, ETL tools, ML/BI tools, etc.
Data observability tools are a part of DataOps platforms. DataOps platforms assemble several types of data management software into an individual, integrated environment. The platform unifies all the development and operations in data workflows. Data observability software focuses on monitoring the health of the data pipelines and the overall system.
Data observability tools differ from monitoring software since the latter focuses on pre-determined metrics to identify bugs, whereas data observability focuses on real-time detection and resolution. Data observability also differs from data quality software, wherein the former focuses on reducing the number of data incidents while accelerating resolution time. Data quality is the result of powerful data observability across the modern data stack.
To qualify for inclusion in the Data Observability category, a product must:
Proactively monitor, alert, track, log, compare, and analyze data for any errors or issues across the entire data stack
Monitor data at rest and data in motion, and does not require data extraction from current storage location
Connect to an existing stack without any need to write code or modify data pipelines