Undoubtedly, businesses rely heavily on real-time data to make informed decisions. However, what occurs when such information is incomplete, delayed, or simply erroneous? That is where data observability comes in.
Data observability enables a team to debug, monitor, and track data pipelines and systems, ensuring dependable and trustworthy insights.
How to Know When Business Needs Data Observability
Still unsure whether your organization requires it? Well, these are the seven clear indicators that you are to look out for:
You have many data outages
Having dashboards that crash frequently or having report screens that turn blank unexpectedly means that there is a lack of visibility in your data systems.
Losing data is both time-consuming and costly, and it erodes confidence in the decision-making process. Also, data observability enables you to identify and address problems before they can impact stakeholders.
There are increasing complaints about the quality of data
Are you tired of your marketing, sales, or finance teams complaining that they lack data or present it in the wrong way, or that it is outdated?
Such complaints often indicate poor data lineage or integrity. By keeping track of changes to the schema, anomalies in volume and freshness metrics, observability tools assist in identifying the ultimate cause of data quality problems.
Your pipeline troubleshooting team is spending hours at work
When something goes wrong, does it have to be hours or even days to find out what went wrong? Your data engineers will have no way to see what they are doing without observability.
The monitoring and logging of potential disruptions are achieved at every stage of the pipeline due to observability, which enables them to be resolved promptly.
Whereas you can not put your finger on the source of errors
This can bring your operations to a standstill because you do not know whether a source system, transformation logic, or storage layer has a data issue.
Data observability means having end-to-end visibility, which allows you to isolate problems in real-time within a single view and prevent their recurrence.
The success of your business depends on real-time analytics
If your company operates with time-sensitive decision-making on streaming or near-real-time data, any delays or failures can be catastrophic in themselves.
Observability ensures your pipelines are dependable and reports any issues to your team promptly.
You are growing at a pace, but the monitoring is manual
Manual verification and a personification of monitoring systems cannot be sustained as your data foundation extends.
Data observability platforms become automated, and they integrate directly with data warehouses, ETL pipelines, and BI tools.
You have had an expensive data event
Occasionally, a single significant event, such as a wrongful report sent to shareholders, a misleading measure presented to executives, or missing customer data, can expose flaws in your data ecosystem.
Such instances do not need to happen, as data observability can monitor anomalies before they occur.
Conclusion
Data observability is not only a technical gap, but it is also a business risk. You should begin focusing on more visibility and trust in your data systems when you are sure that one of the following seven indicators is present in your organization.
