Great question! As Salma Bakouk shared in our recent webinar, data observability is critical because it builds trust and reliability across your data ecosystem. With poor data quality costing companies an average of $13 million annually, having a strong observability platform helps teams proactively detect issues, ensure data freshness, and align analytics efforts with business goals.

Great question! Inefficient SQL queries can lead to slow dashboards, increased ingestion latency, and even failed workloads. By optimizing your queries using best practices like proper filtering and avoiding SELECT *, you help improve data pipeline monitoring and maintain overall data reliability.

There are four main types: technical lineage, business lineage, cross-system lineage, and governance lineage. Each serves a different purpose, from debugging pipelines to supporting compliance. Tools like Sifflet offer field-level lineage for deeper insights, helping teams across engineering, analytics, and compliance understand and trust their data.

At Sifflet, we’re leveraging MCP to build agents that can observe, decide, and act across distributed systems. By injecting telemetry data, user context, and pipeline metadata as structured resources, our agents can navigate complex environments and improve distributed systems observability in a scalable and modular way.

Great question! AI doesn't usually fail because of bad models, but because of unreliable data. Without strong data observability in place, it's hard to detect data issues like schema changes, stale tables, or broken pipelines. These problems undermine trust, and without trust in your data, even the best models can't deliver value.

Absolutely. AI systems need more than just schemas—they need context. Observability platforms like Sifflet provide machine-readable trust signals, data freshness checks, and reliability scores through APIs. This allows autonomous agents to assess data quality in real time and make smarter decisions without relying on outdated documentation.

We’re just getting started! Soon, you’ll be able to monitor dbt run performance and resource utilization, define monitors in your dbt YAML files, and use custom metadata even more dynamically. These updates will further enhance your cloud data observability and make your workflows even more efficient.

Etam uses observability tools like Sifflet to maintain a healthy data pipeline. By continuously monitoring real-time metrics and setting up proactive alerts, they can catch issues early and ensure their data remains trustworthy as they scale operations.