Understand Business Impact with Reference Tables

In August 2025, a new feature was introduced allowing users to build reference tables by uploading a CSV via the Add Data function to provide valuable business context often missing from standard logs, metrics, and traces. This enhancement addresses challenges in rapidly understanding business impacts during incidents, as critical data like customer names and product details are usually external to EC2 instances or Kubernetes clusters. By enriching telemetry data with external business context, such as customer and product lists, users can create Resource datasets for ephemeral associations or use reference tables for enduring associations like Product or Employee IDs. The blog post uses the OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop as an example to demonstrate how reference tables can quickly estimate revenue loss from a failing checkout service by integrating product names and prices into machine data. The enriched Container Logs dataset allows for swift calculation of revenue loss during an incident, providing insights into the business impact. Users are encouraged to explore this feature through Observe's documentation, API reference, and Terraform, with a free trial available for firsthand experience.

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