Field-level lineage gives you a detailed view into how individual data fields move and transform through your pipelines. This level of granularity is super helpful for root cause analysis and understanding the impact of changes. A platform with strong data lineage tracking helps teams troubleshoot faster and maintain high data quality.

Yes, many open-source ETL tools like Airbyte or Talend can be extended to support observability features. By integrating them with a cloud data observability platform like Sifflet, you can add layers of telemetry instrumentation, anomaly detection, and alerting. This ensures your open-source stack remains robust, reliable, and ready for scale.

Great question! A data schema defines structure across your entire data ecosystem, including pipelines, APIs, and ingestion tools. A database schema, on the other hand, is specific to one system, like PostgreSQL or BigQuery, and focuses on tables, columns, and relationships. Both are essential for effective data governance and observability.

In 2025, expect to see more focus on AI-driven anomaly detection, dynamic thresholding, and predictive analytics monitoring. Staying ahead means experimenting with new observability tools, engaging with peers, and continuously aligning your data strategy with evolving business needs.

Reducing AI bias starts with understanding your data. Sifflet’s observability platform gives you deep visibility into data sources, transformations, and quality. By tracking data lineage and applying data profiling, teams can identify and correct biased inputs before they affect model outcomes. This transparency helps build more ethical and reliable AI systems.

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.

You can prevent schema-related breakages by using data observability tools that offer real-time schema drift detection and alerting. These tools help you catch changes early, validate against data contracts, and maintain SLA compliance across your data pipelines.

The very first step is to set clear objectives that align with your company’s level of data maturity and business needs. This means involving stakeholders from different departments and deciding whether your focus is on exploratory analysis, business intelligence, or innovation through AI and ML. These goals will guide your choices in data stack, platform, and hiring.