OpenTelemetry as an Enterprise Data Asset
Observability data is evolving from operational logs to a strategic enterprise asset, enabling businesses to link technical incidents with customer and financial impact for faster resolution and long-term analysis.
Engineering leaders once focused on collecting telemetry to reduce resolution time, but modern platforms like Observe by Snowflake now prioritize business outcomes over logs and traces. Observability now connects technical data to customer churn, revenue, and business impact, addressing real-world incidents where degraded performance risks revenue and customer experience. During a payment service outage at a large financial services company, engineers used Observe’s Observability Context Graph and AI SRE to isolate the issue, map dependencies, and restore service, demonstrating how operational telemetry can drive immediate action.
After resolving the incident, the team enriched operational telemetry with customer accounts, transactions, and product usage to assess broader impact. This shift transformed observability from an operational problem into a data problem, allowing leaders to quantify customer impact, estimate revenue at risk, and prioritize fixes based on business outcomes rather than just technical root causes.
As organizations mature, telemetry is becoming a long-lived enterprise asset, retained and governed alongside customer and business data. OpenTelemetry and technologies like Apache Iceberg enable interoperable, vendor-neutral storage of telemetry, allowing it to be analyzed across analytics, AI, and operational workflows rather than remaining siloed in operational platforms.
Engineering leaders often ask how observability and data platforms should integrate. Snowflake provides the data foundation, while Observe offers purpose-built observability workflows, AI SRE, and the Observability Context Graph to connect telemetry with infrastructure relationships for faster incident resolution. Post-incident, telemetry in Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud can be enriched with enterprise data to identify trends and prioritize reliability investments.