DevOps and platform engineering are essential disciplines that provide immense value in the realm of cloud-native technology and software delivery. However, these practices cannot stand alone. Rather, they must be bolstered by additional technological investments to ensure reliability, security, and efficiency. One of these key investments includes observability.

Observability of applications and infrastructure serves as a critical foundation for DevOps and platform engineering, offering a comprehensive view into system performance and behavior. It goes beyond traditional monitoring-metrics, logs, and traces-to encompass topology mapping, code-level details, and user experience metrics that provide real-time insights. This real-time awareness enables teams to rapidly detect and resolve issues: both indispensable capabilities for maintaining the agility and reliability that are central to DevOps and platform engineering processes.

Moreover, observability is the launchpad for maturing DevOps and platform engineering postures. Recent research found that 71% of organizations actively use observability data and insights to drive automation decisions and improvements in DevOps workflows. The technology has also enabled 78% of organizations to automate release validation and 74% of organizations to identify bottlenecks and automate delivery pipelines.