Recently, conversations have been increasing around OpenTelemetry; it is gaining more and more momentum in Node.js development circles, but what is it? How can we take advantage of the key concepts and implement them in our projects? Of note, NodeSource is a supporter of OpenTelemetry, and we have recently implemented full support of the open-source standard in our product N|Solid. It allows us to make our powerful Node.js insights accessible via the protocol.

Unravel now pulls in data quality checks from external tools into its single-pane-of-glass full-stack observability view.

I was chatting with Sanjeev Mohan, Principal and Founder of SanjMo Consulting and former Research Vice President at Gartner, about how the emergence of DataOps is changing people’s idea of what “data observability” means. Not in any semantic sense or a definitional war of words, but in terms of what data teams need to stay on top of an increasingly complex modern data stack.

As a cloud service provider, observability is a critical subject as it's strongly related to the availability of the services running on the platform. We need to understand everything that is happening on our platform to troubleshoot errors as fast as possible and improve performance issues. A year ago, while the platform was still in private beta, we faced a tough reliability issue: users were facing random 500 errors when accessing their applications.

Today every company is a data company. And even with all the great new data systems and technologies, it’s people—data teams—who unlock the power of data to drive business value. But today’s data teams are getting bogged down. They’re struggling to keep pace with the increased volume, velocity, variety, complexity—and cost—of the modern data stack. That’s where Unravel DataOps observability comes in.

As organizations invest ever more heavily in modernizing their data stacks, data teams—the people who actually deliver the value of data to the business—are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the performance, cost, and quality of these complex systems. Data teams today find themselves in much the same boat as software teams were 10+ years ago. Software teams have dug themselves out the hole with DevOps best practices and tools—chief among them full-stack observability.