Improving your telemetry data for better observability

Improving telemetry data is crucial for enhancing observability, which in turn reduces mean time to repair (MTTR), increases visibility, and offers greater value for money. Iris Dyrmishi, a Senior Observability Engineer at Miro, emphasizes that better data quality is essential for efficient incident response and strong correlations across logs, metrics, and traces. Observability should be a collaborative effort involving engineers who understand their applications, with guidance from observability teams to ensure best practices and cost-effective data management. Tracing, metrics, and logging should be optimized for clarity, relevance, and uniformity, using tools like OpenTelemetry to standardize and enhance data collection. Addressing issues such as high cardinality in metrics, unnecessary debug logs, and the presence of personally identifiable information (PII) in logs can further improve data quality and reduce costs. By adopting a strategic approach to observability, organizations can achieve a more efficient and cost-effective system that benefits both engineers and the business as a whole.