Observability

Telemetry contracts, collection, routing, operating signals, and vendor-neutral system design.

• Observability systems: design the telemetry path before the dashboard · Guide · A systems guide to telemetry contracts, collection, routing, storage boundaries, and operational feedback at scale.
• Vendor-neutral observability platform · Project · Architected a log repatriation and routing platform designed to ingest 150 TB per day across more than 10,000 systems without coupling teams to one observability vendor.
• Staff Software Developer & Enterprise Architect — Royal Bank of Canada · Experience · Building enterprise platforms and standards across architecture automation, observability, cloud infrastructure, and responsible AI.
• Elastic support for OpenTelemetry and managed OTLP ingestion · Note · Elastic supports OpenTelemetry through managed OTLP ingestion, the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry, and standard SDK or collector pipelines. Organisations can send traces,…
• Dynatrace support for OpenTelemetry and native OTLP · Note · Dynatrace supports OpenTelemetry through native OTLP API endpoints, the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector, and a Dynatrace collector distribution. It also supports mixed environments…
• Datadog support for OpenTelemetry and OTLP ingestion · Note · Datadog accepts OpenTelemetry data through several integration paths, but the resulting product capabilities are not identical. A design should choose explicitly between the Datadog…
• Splunk support for OpenTelemetry collection and OTLP · Note · Splunk supports OpenTelemetry through the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, standard OTLP ingestion paths, and integrations with Splunk Observability Cloud and Splunk…
• AWS support for OpenTelemetry with ADOT and CloudWatch · Note · AWS supports OpenTelemetry through several paths: the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, the CloudWatch agent, upstream or custom collectors, and CloudWatch OTLP endpoints. The right choice…
• Microsoft 365 audit data in an OpenTelemetry pipeline · Note · Microsoft 365 audit data is valuable operational and security telemetry, but Microsoft 365 is not itself a general native OTLP source. The reliable architecture is to retrieve tenant…
• OpenTelemetry pipeline architecture for vendor-neutral observability · Note · OpenTelemetry standardises how applications produce and transmit traces, metrics, and logs. It does not make every backend identical, and it does not operate the telemetry path…
• Capacity planning begins with constraints · Note · Capacity planning is not forecasting one traffic number and adding a fixed percentage. It is identifying which resource limits the user outcome, how demand approaches that limit, and…
• Service-level objectives are decision tools · Note · A service level objective is not a decorative percentage on a dashboard. It is an agreement about the reliability users need and a mechanism for deciding how engineering capacity should…
• Treat telemetry as a production contract · Note · Telemetry is often added after a service is built: a few logs, default metrics, and traces sampled when something fails. At scale, that creates inconsistent names, missing context,…