By Reese Lee, New Relic
It’s a tale as old as time: The engineering team is reporting that system uptime is a robust 99.99%. Dashboards are green, alerts are quiet. Somewhere in the distance, the GVP of Sales is fielding calls from top-tier customers complaining about slow performance, and product managers are seeing a drop in conversion rates on a key feature. How can a system be technically “healthy” but fail the business?
Okay. So maybe this tale isn’t quite as old as time, but it is time to answer this question. This disconnect highlights a critical limitation of traditional software monitoring. Absolutely, metrics such as CPU usage and error rates are vital for understanding system health-but they don’t tell the whole story. They answer if the system is running, but not how well it’s serving the business.
What can we do about this? Business observability. It sounds like yet another buzzword (buzzterm?), but let’s explore this. If we shift strategically from traditional monitoring (which also often meant siloed telemetry signals) and instead practice correlating technical performance data with key business results in real time, we can transform your organization’s telemetry data from an IT troubleshooting tool into a rich source of business intelligence.
Enter OpenTelemetry
Lucky for us open source aficionados, CNCF has just the observability framework: OpenTelemetry (OTel). It’s the de facto standard for application instrumentation and the generation of telemetry, which means it provides a unified language for understanding system behavior.
Its true power for business leaders (and app developers alike) is in its flexible and extensible data model, which allows you to enrich the standard app telemetry with custom business-critical context. It isn’t just about adding another tag, although-spoiler alert-it will definitely involve this.
It’s about melding the language of your business directly onto your operational data, and in doing so, creating a single, unified data stream that speaks to engineers, product managers, and executives alike.
In practice
Let’s take your standard application trace, which shows how a user request travels through your various microservices. By itself, it’s useful for an engineer debugging a slowdown, or some other issue. But with OTel, you can enrich that same trace with business attributes that tell a fuller customer story, making it valuable to multiple teams.
Perhaps you own an e-commerce platform. You can configure OTel to add business context (yes, as tags) to every user request trace, such as:
- customer.tier: Is this a ‘platinum’ or ‘free’ user?
- ecommerce.cart.value: What is the monetary value of this specific transaction?
- feature_flag.name: Is this user part of an A/B test for a new checkout flow?
- billing.plan: Which subscription plan is this SaaS user on?
Isn’t that cool? This enrichment transforms your telemetry data. It’s no longer just a series of technical events; it’s a detailed record of your customer’s experience, complete with the business context that helps you understand its impact.
Better questions, better answers
Once you’ve added these valuable tidbits of business context, you can move beyond purely technical questions to ask far more strategic ones. Here’s a table that compares a few common examples:
Answering these kinds of questions means you can prioritize engineering efforts based on direct business impact. Instead of tackling the bug that’s making the most noise, your teams can focus on fixing the issue that is costing the most revenue or affecting your most important customers.
From Cost Center to Revenue Driver
Of course, you might say that the idea of tagging app traces with business context isn’t new-to be sure, the implementation itself is basically “just” adding custom attributes onto your app telemetry. However, when you add custom attributes that help you answer business questions-it fundamentally changes the role of observability in your org. More than being a valuable IT support resource center, it’s now also a proactive engine for business growth and data-driven decision-making.
Sounds pretty awesome! Interested in learning more about OTel? Check out the project docs here, and feel free to reach out to me on CNCF’s Slack instance any time!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Reese Lee, Senior Developer Relations Engineer
Reese Lee is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer focused in the open source software space. She regularly speaks on OpenTelemetry-related subjects, and likes troubleshooting technically complex issues. In her free time, she enjoys training Brazilian jiu-jitsu, watching scary movies, and reading sci-fi.
