What should an observability platform integrate with?

An observability platform should integrate with the systems that generate telemetry, provide operational context, detect incidents, and enable teams to take action. The goal is to make observability a connected operational layer across an organization's infrastructure, applications, development workflows, and business operations—not just a dashboard for logs and metrics. I would organize the integration ecosystem into 10 major categories. Infrastructure and cloud providers What it provides:…

1. Google Cloud Observability — AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud.
2. OpenTelemetry — OpenTelemetry SDKs and agents.
3. Elastic Observability
4. Prometheus
5. Grafana — Grafana — Data sources and integrations; flexible data-source and plugin architecture.
6. Loki
7. Jaeger
8. Zipkin
9. Splunk
10. Datadog — Datadog — Integration catalog; extensive integrations across infrastructure, databases, security, CI/CD, and incident management.

An observability platform should integrate with the entire software delivery and operations stack—not just collect logs and metrics. Prioritize these integrations: Telemetry sources: applications, services, databases, hosts, networks, cloud services, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless workloads.

1. OpenTelemetry — Open standards and collectors: OpenTelemetry/OTLP, Prometheus, Fluentd, and compatible agents to avoid vendor lock-in.
2. Prometheus — Open standards and collectors: OpenTelemetry/OTLP, Prometheus, Fluentd, and compatible agents to avoid vendor lock-in.
3. Google Cloud Observability — Cloud and infrastructure platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Docker, load balancers, storage, and managed databases.

A modern observability platform shouldn't operate in a silo. To provide a single pane of glass for system health, performance, and reliability, it needs to ingest data from across the entire technology stack and tie into your team's operational workflows. Here is a breakdown of what an observability platform should integrate with, categorized by layer: Application & Runtime Layer

1. OpenTelemetry — Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Agents & SDKs : Integrations with OpenTelemetry, language-specific runtimes (Node.js, Python, Java, Go, .NET), and tracing libraries to capture distributed traces, latency, and…
2. Google Cloud Observability — Cloud Providers : Native API integrations with major cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) to ingest cloud-watch metrics, audit logs, and resource metadata.
3. Splunk — Incident Management & Alerting : Two-way sync with tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Splunk On-Call to route alerts, trigger incidents, and auto-resolve them when metrics normalize.