Great question! Software observability took off in the 2010s with the rise of cloud-native apps, but data observability is catching up fast. As businesses start treating data as a mission-critical asset—especially with the growth of AI and cloud data platforms like Snowflake—the need for real-time visibility, data reliability, and governance has become urgent. We're in the early innings, but the pace is accelerating quickly.

Data quality monitoring ensures your data is accurate, complete, and consistent. A good data catalog should include profiling and validation tools that help teams assess data quality, which is crucial for maintaining SLA compliance and enabling proactive monitoring.

A Single Source of Truth (SSOT) is a centralized repository where all organizational data is stored and accessed consistently. While it sounds ideal, achieving it is tough because different tools often measure data in unique ways, leading to multiple interpretations. Ensuring data reliability and consistency across sources is where data observability platforms like Sifflet can make a real difference.

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.

A modern data stack typically includes tools for ingestion, warehousing, transformation and business intelligence. For example, you might use Fivetran for ingestion, Snowflake for warehousing, dbt for transformation and Looker for analytics. Investing in the right observability tools across this stack is key to maintaining data reliability and enabling real-time metrics that support smart, data-driven decisions.

This checklist is for anyone who relies on trustworthy data—from CDOs and analysts to DataOps teams and engineers. Whether you're focused on data governance, anomaly detection, or building resilient pipelines, the checklist gives you a clear path to choosing the right observability tools.

We're proud to work with amazing organizations like St-Gobain, Penguin Random House, and Euronext. These enterprises rely on Sifflet for cloud data observability, data lineage tracking, and proactive monitoring to ensure their data is always AI-ready and analytics-friendly.

Great design is essential in data observability platforms because it helps users navigate complex workflows with ease and confidence. At Sifflet, we believe that combining intuitive UX with a visually consistent UI empowers Data Engineers and Analysts to monitor data quality, detect anomalies, and ensure SLA compliance more efficiently.