Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Observability isn’t about collecting more telemetry — it’s about making that telemetry data meaningful. Contextual observability transforms raw telemetry into actionable insights by enriching it with consistent tagging and metadata. Without context, telemetry data remains fragmented, troubleshooting slows, and aligning with business priorities is nearly impossible.

‘Without the internet, Digital Experiences do not exist,’ begins Increase Revenue and Improve Customer Experience with Internet Performance Monitoring, a study commissioned by Catchpoint to quantify the financial damage from internet outages. At first glance, that might seem painfully obvious—like pointing out that water is wet. But pause for a moment and consider: the digital experience today isn't just an aspect of business; it is the business. Suddenly, the stakes feel very different.

In recent months, the IT monitoring landscape has seen notable investment activity: These developments are part of a larger trend, with investment firms showing growing interest in the IT monitoring sector. Although such activity isn’t unusual in the tech industry, the current intensity and frequency indicate that IT monitoring is emerging as a key area for growth-oriented strategies.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key metrics for monitoring Airflow. In Part 2, we discussed strategies for collecting Airflow metrics, logs, and lineage. Finally, we will look at how you can use Datadog to monitor all this telemetry in a single consolidated view alongside telemetry from the rest of your infrastructure and services.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at key Airflow metrics to monitor. Now, we’ll explore how you can collect those metrics, along with logs and traces, using Airflow’s native tooling. We’ll also look at a few key ways you can monitor this data from within the Airflow webserver interface.