Centralized Observability

How an Enterprise Architect can build true centralized observability across multi-cloud + on-prem, without losing cloud-native advantages.

🧭 1️⃣ The Goal

Create a “single pane of glass” for logs, metrics, traces, and alerts — regardless of where workloads run (Azure, AWS, GCP, or on-prem).

Centralized observability =→ all telemetry collected in a standardized format (OpenTelemetry)→ aggregated in a vendor-neutral observability layer (e.g. Grafana, Elastic, Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk, New Relic)→ accessible through central dashboards, alerting, and correlation.

🧩 2️⃣ Architecture Overview (Conceptually)

+--------------------------------------------------------------+
|                     Central Observability                    |
|                                                              |
|  +----------------+   +----------------+   +----------------+ |
|  | Metrics Store  |   | Logs Store     |   | Traces Store   | |
|  | (Prometheus)   |   | (ELK/Splunk)   |   | (Jaeger/Tempo) | |
|  +----------------+   +----------------+   +----------------+ |
|                                                              |
|  Unified dashboards (Grafana), alerting, correlation          |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
        ↑                       ↑                     ↑
        |                       |                     |
        |                       |                     |
+---------------+     +----------------+    +----------------+
| Azure Monitor |     | AWS CloudWatch |    | GCP Monitoring |
+---------------+     +----------------+    +----------------+
        ↑                       ↑                     ↑
        |                       |                     |
        |   Exporters / OpenTelemetry Collectors       |
        +-----------------------+----------------------+
                                ↑
                                |
                          On-prem Prometheus / ELK

⚙️ 3️⃣ Step-by-Step Implementation

Step 1: Standardize Telemetry Collection

• Use OpenTelemetry (OTel) everywhere.

• Deploy OTel Collectors on each environment (Kubernetes, VM, or host).

• These collectors:

  • Pull metrics from native sources (Azure Monitor, CloudWatch, GCP Ops Agent, etc.)

  • Normalize telemetry (convert to OTel format)

  • Push data to the central collector / aggregator.

📘 Example:

• Azure Monitor Metrics → OTel Collector → Prometheus remote write → Central Prometheus

• CloudWatch Logs → Firehose → OpenSearch / ELK → Centralized log analytics

Step 2: Choose a Central Observability Platform

There are three broad patterns:

🅐 Option 1 — Self-Managed Central Stack

• Deploy a central observability platform in one place (cloud or on-prem):

  • Metrics → Prometheus + Thanos (for multi-cluster federation)

  • Logs → ELK / OpenSearch

  • Traces → Tempo / Jaeger

  • Dashboards → Grafana

✅ Pros: Full control, cost-optimized❌ Cons: Maintenance heavy, scaling challenge

🅑 Option 2 — Commercial SaaS (Unified APM)

• Use cross-cloud SaaS like:

  • Datadog

  • New Relic

  • Dynatrace

  • Splunk Observability Cloud

  • Elastic Cloud

✅ Pros: Single pane across Azure + AWS + GCP + On-prem✅ Pros: Out-of-box agents for all clouds❌ Cons: Cost, data sovereignty concerns

🅒 Option 3 — Hybrid Aggregation

• Keep cloud-native monitoring local (for latency & cost)

• Forward summarized / aggregated telemetry to central SaaS

  • e.g. send only key metrics, error logs, traces above threshold

✅ Pros: Balance between compliance and central visibility

Step 3: Integration of Cloud-Native Sources

Cloud	Local Observability	How to Export
Azure	Azure Monitor, Log Analytics	Diagnostic Settings → Event Hub → Logstash / OTel Collector
AWS	CloudWatch, X-Ray	CloudWatch Metric Streams → Firehose → OpenSearch / OTel Collector
GCP	Cloud Logging, Monitoring	Ops Agent → Pub/Sub → Fluentd / OTel Collector
On-prem	Prometheus, ELK	Remote write to central Thanos / Federated Elastic cluster

All these are funneled through collectors → central pipeline → unified dashboards.

Step 4: Unified Dashboards and Alerts

Use Grafana (or equivalent) as the presentation layer:

• Integrate Prometheus (metrics), ELK (logs), Tempo/Jaeger (traces)

• Build cross-cloud dashboards

  • Example: “App latency by region (Azure vs AWS vs GCP)”

  • Example: “Error rate comparison for Loan Service across environments”

• Define unified alert rules (PromQL + Grafana Alerting)

• Route alerts to ServiceNow / PagerDuty / Slack

Step 5: Enforce Data Residency & Compliance

Since logs may contain PII or regulated data:

• Keep raw logs in-region (in-cloud).

• Send aggregated metrics / anonymized logs to the central platform.

• Use data masking & tokenization before export (especially from EU/India regions due to GDPR/RBI).

Step 6: Automation & Governance

Integrate into your DevSecOps governance:

• Observability standards in every IaC module (Terraform includes logging/metrics setup)

• CI/CD pipeline validates:

  • “No deployment without telemetry configuration”

  • “All services expose standard OTel endpoints”

• Periodic audits: coverage % of monitored services.

🧠 4️⃣ Example — Enterprise-Scale Hybrid Observability (like Deutsche Bank)

Layer	Implementation
Telemetry Collection	OTel Collectors deployed in each VPC/VNet and on-prem K8s clusters
Metrics Storage	Thanos (federated Prometheus) in central Azure subscription
Logs	ELK in Azure; each cloud’s logs exported via FluentBit
Traces	Tempo collecting from microservices (Spring Boot + OTel SDK)
Visualization	Grafana dashboards for all environments
Alerting	Grafana + PagerDuty + ServiceNow
Governance	Policy: all microservices must implement OTel SDK, logging JSON schema, trace IDs

Outcome → true centralized visibility, but still cloud-native control in each environment.

✅ 5️⃣ Summary

Challenge	Solution
Each cloud has its own observability	Standardize via OpenTelemetry
Need unified dashboards	Grafana / Datadog / Elastic Cloud
Data residency restrictions	Keep raw logs local, aggregate centrally
Multi-cloud federation	Prometheus Thanos + Federated ELK
Consistency enforcement	IaC modules + Policy-as-Code

Perfect — how to implement centralized observability across multi-cloud and on-prem, step by step.We’ll go layer by layer so you can visualize the flow and the architecture without a diagram.

🧩 1️⃣ The Core Problem

Each environment has its own observability stack:

• Azure: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights

• AWS: CloudWatch, X-Ray, CloudTrail

• GCP: Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging

• On-Prem: Prometheus, ELK, AppDynamics, Dynatrace

These systems don’t talk to each other natively — so each team gets isolated visibility, which leads to inconsistent monitoring, duplicate alerts, and fragmented root cause analysis.

To solve this, we need a centralized observability plane that can ingest telemetry from all environments, normalize it, and make it viewable and actionable through a unified interface.

⚙️ 2️⃣ The Target State — “Single Pane of Glass” Observability

A centralized observability framework must deliver:

1. Unified telemetry — logs, metrics, traces in a standard format.

2. Cross-cloud correlation — same trace ID can be followed from on-prem to Azure to AWS.

3. Central dashboarding and alerting — one place for SREs, architects, and ops teams to monitor the enterprise ecosystem.

4. Data residency compliance — sensitive data stays in-region; only metadata or aggregated metrics move centrally.

🧠 3️⃣ Architecture Layers (Text Representation)

Layer 1 – Local Collection per Environment

Each environment (cloud or on-prem) runs local collectors/agents:

• Azure: Enable Diagnostic Settings to export telemetry to Event Hub or Log Analytics.

• AWS: Use CloudWatch Metric Streams + Firehose or CloudWatch Agent.

• GCP: Use Ops Agent or FluentBit to export logs/metrics.

• On-Prem: Use Prometheus, Fluentd/FluentBit, and Jaeger/Tempo for distributed tracing.

All these collectors normalize data into OpenTelemetry (OTel) format.

Layer 2 – Telemetry Normalization (OpenTelemetry Collectors)

Each environment sends telemetry (logs, metrics, traces) to a local OpenTelemetry Collector.

• The collector converts native formats (CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Ops Agent outputs) into OpenTelemetry-compatible data.

• Collectors can apply filters, data masking, or sampling before forwarding.

This ensures that all telemetry — regardless of cloud — uses a common schema.

Layer 3 – Data Transport

OTel Collectors then push or stream telemetry to a centralized aggregation point using:

• gRPC or HTTP for metrics and traces.

• FluentBit or Kafka pipeline for logs.

• Secure channels via VPN, ExpressRoute, Direct Connect, or Interconnect.

This ensures secure and reliable data flow between cloud regions and the central platform.

Layer 4 – Central Aggregation and Storage

At the enterprise level, you maintain a central observability cluster (can be deployed on any cloud or on-prem), hosting:

• Prometheus + Thanos (or VictoriaMetrics) for metrics federation.

• Elastic Stack (ELK) or OpenSearch for logs.

• Tempo or Jaeger for distributed traces.

These components store, index, and correlate telemetry from all connected environments.

Layer 5 – Visualization and Alerting

Use a central Grafana instance as the unified visualization and alerting layer:

• Dashboards show metrics from Prometheus, logs from ELK, traces from Tempo.

• You can visualize metrics across environments, e.g.:

  • “API latency — Azure vs AWS vs On-Prem”

  • “Error rate — Retail Banking App (multi-region view)”

• Define alert rules centrally in Grafana, and route alerts to ServiceNow, PagerDuty, or Slack.

This becomes the single observability control center for all environments.

Layer 6 – Data Governance and Residency

For compliance:

• Raw logs stay within the originating environment (e.g., India region for RBI compliance).

• Only metadata or aggregated KPIs (counts, error percentages, latency distributions) are exported centrally.

• Data masking and encryption are enforced in the collector pipeline.

• Access control is federated via corporate SSO (Azure AD / Okta) so only authorized users can view dashboards or query logs.

Layer 7 – Automation and Policy Enforcement

To ensure observability is consistent:

• All Terraform or ARM templates for app deployment must include:

  • OTel SDK integration in app code.

  • Logging format (JSON + traceID).

  • Export configuration to OTel Collector.

• CI/CD pipelines validate telemetry configuration before promotion.

• Periodic policy checks (using OPA / Sentinel) ensure no application is deployed without observability hooks.

This enforces observability governance at build and deploy time.

🏗️ 4️⃣ Step-by-Step Flow (Text Summary)

1. Application generates telemetry → logs, metrics, and traces.

2. Local agents (FluentBit, CloudWatch Agent, Ops Agent, Prometheus exporters) collect telemetry.

3. OpenTelemetry Collectors in each environment standardize and forward telemetry securely.

4. Central observability cluster ingests all telemetry into Prometheus (metrics), ELK (logs), and Tempo (traces).

5. Grafana reads from all data sources to present unified dashboards and send alerts.

6. Data governance policies ensure data masking, encryption, and compliance.

7. CI/CD automation ensures new workloads automatically onboard into observability.

🧾 5️⃣ Example – Enterprise Scenario (like Deutsche Bank)

• Azure: Azure Monitor exports metrics/logs via Event Hub → OTel Collector.

• AWS: CloudWatch Streams → Firehose → OTel Collector.

• GCP: Cloud Logging → Pub/Sub → FluentBit → OTel Collector.

• On-Prem: Prometheus and Fluentd forward data directly to the central Thanos and ELK.

• Central Stack: Prometheus + Thanos, ELK, Tempo, Grafana in Azure.

• Visualization: Grafana dashboard correlating performance, latency, and availability across all clouds.

• Alerting: Grafana Alert Manager → PagerDuty + ServiceNow.

• Governance: Policy that every new microservice must emit OTel-compliant telemetry.

Result: one enterprise-wide observability platform that gives unified insight across Azure, AWS, GCP, and on-prem — but still allows each environment to operate its local stack independently.

✅ 6️⃣ Key Takeaways

Goal	Approach
Eliminate fragmented monitoring	Use OpenTelemetry standard collectors
Enable cross-cloud correlation	Centralize metrics/logs/traces into one data plane
Maintain compliance	Keep raw data local, export only aggregates
Ensure consistent observability	Enforce via IaC, CI/CD, and policy-as-code
Provide single pane of glass	Grafana + centralized observability stack

Excellent 👍 — here’s a text-only detailed view of how to enforce centralized observability governance across multi-cloud + on-prem environments.

Think of this as the governance layer that sits above your observability architecture — ensuring consistency, compliance, and reliability across every cloud, business unit, and platform team.

🧭 1️⃣ Objective of Observability Governance

The goal is not just central visibility, but controlled, consistent, and compliant observability across all environments (Azure, AWS, GCP, on-prem).

Governance ensures:

• Every system is observable in a consistent way

• Metrics, logs, and traces follow enterprise standards

• Data privacy, residency, and retention are enforced

• Observability cost and performance are managed

• Teams adopt observability as a shared responsibility, not ad-hoc monitoring

🏗️ 2️⃣ Governance Operating Model

A. Governance Roles and Responsibilities

Role	Responsibility
Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE)	Define observability strategy, standards, and approved tools
Platform Engineering Team	Build and maintain central observability stack (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Tempo)
Security & Compliance	Approve data residency, masking, encryption, retention policies
Application / Dev Teams	Implement OTel SDKs and adhere to telemetry standards
FinOps / Cost Governance	Monitor observability storage, ingestion rates, retention costs

B. Governance Model Layers

1. Policy Definition Layer → What to measure and how

2. Implementation Layer → How telemetry is collected and sent

3. Compliance & Control Layer → Who validates coverage and data handling

4. Continuous Improvement Layer → Regular reviews, dashboards, and reports

⚙️ 3️⃣ Standardized Observability Policies (Policy-as-Code)

Governance is implemented as policy-as-code (in Terraform, OPA, or Sentinel) and applied uniformly across all environments.

Policy Category	Example Rule
Instrumentation Policy	Every microservice must expose /metrics (Prometheus endpoint) and OTel trace ID headers
Log Policy	Logs must be in JSON with standard fields: timestamp, traceID, spanID, logLevel, serviceName
Metrics Policy	Metric names must follow <service>_<resource>_<metric> convention
Trace Policy	Trace context propagation must be W3C standard
Retention Policy	Metrics retained 30 days, logs 90 days, traces 7 days
Data Residency	Raw logs cannot be exported from India region; only aggregated metrics allowed
Access Policy	Grafana dashboards access controlled via Azure AD groups
Alerting Policy	Every production service must define at least 1 critical and 1 warning alert
Cost Policy	Alert on storage utilization >80% or ingestion spikes >20% over baseline

🧠 4️⃣ Lifecycle Integration — Governance at Every Stage

A. Design Phase

• Architects define observability requirements in the design document (e.g., KPIs, SLOs, log schema).

• Choose approved toolchains (Prometheus, ELK, Tempo, Grafana, OTel SDK).

• Select data classification for telemetry (PII, non-PII).

B. Build Phase

• Dev teams implement OTel SDK in application code.

• Use pre-approved logging libraries and exporters.

• Terraform templates automatically configure metrics/logs exporters and OTel Collectors.

C. Deploy Phase

• CI/CD pipeline enforces observability compliance:

  • Check for OTel annotations in manifests.

  • Validate metrics endpoints exposed.

  • Reject deployment if telemetry config missing.

D. Run Phase

• Continuous compliance checks via OPA or custom scripts.

• Automated dashboards show “observability coverage %” by application and cloud.

• Alerts for missing telemetry or non-standard log formats.

📊 5️⃣ Centralized Dashboards for Governance

Governance requires its own dashboards, not just for operations, but for policy visibility:

Dashboard Name	Description
Coverage Dashboard	% of applications with OTel integration across clouds
Telemetry Quality Dashboard	Schema validation success/failure rates
Data Residency Dashboard	Data flow compliance across regions
Retention & Cost Dashboard	Storage usage and cost trends by team
Alert Hygiene Dashboard	Count of services with no alert or excessive alerts
Compliance Scorecard	Weighted score per team based on policy adherence

These dashboards give leadership and audit teams a measurable governance view.

🔒 6️⃣ Data Governance Integration

Observability data often includes sensitive content (PII, account IDs, tokens), so governance enforces:

Control	Implementation
Data Masking	OTel Collector processors mask regex-defined PII (email, PAN, phone)
Encryption in Transit	TLS between collectors and central stack
Encryption at Rest	ELK, Prometheus, Tempo configured with encrypted disks
Regional Isolation	Logs stay local, aggregated metrics allowed centrally
Audit Trails	Access to logs and dashboards audited via SSO provider

These ensure RBI, GDPR, and ISO27001 compliance across all observability data.

🧩 7️⃣ Tooling Integration for Central Governance

Function	Tool / Platform
Policy Enforcement	OPA (Open Policy Agent), Terraform Sentinel
Automation	GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux) for config drift detection
Security & Compliance	Prisma Cloud, Defender for Cloud for posture scanning
Cost Management	CloudHealth / Azure Cost Mgmt for storage and ingestion
Incident Mgmt Integration	Grafana Alerts → ServiceNow / PagerDuty
Audit	ServiceNow CMDB and Governance module track coverage

🏛️ 8️⃣ Governance Operating Rhythm (Cadence)

Frequency	Activity	Stakeholders
Weekly	Review of observability compliance metrics	Platform + DevOps Teams
Monthly	Architecture & Observability Governance Guild (cross-cloud review)	CCoE, Security, App Leads
Quarterly	Executive summary of observability maturity and gaps	CTO, CIO, Compliance
Ad-hoc	Root cause analysis and governance updates post-incident	SRE + CCoE

🧭 9️⃣ Example — How It Works in Practice

Scenario: Loan Processing microservices deployed across Azure and on-prem.

1. Each service uses the standard OTel SDK to emit metrics and traces.

2. Logs in JSON format with traceID.

3. Local OTel Collectors forward metrics/logs to Azure Monitor and the central Thanos/ELK cluster.

4. Governance policy checks verify:

   • OTel annotations present in manifest.

   • Logs use approved schema.

   • Data not leaving India region.

5. Grafana dashboard shows this app as “Compliant: 100%” in the governance view.

6. If non-compliant, CI/CD blocks release and notifies the team.

This creates continuous compliance — governance is enforced automatically.

✅ 10️⃣ Summary — Enterprise Observability Governance Framework

Layer	Governance Focus	Implementation
Policy Definition	Standards for telemetry, schema, retention, security	Defined by CCoE
Instrumentation Governance	OTel SDK mandatory, standard log schema	Enforced via IaC templates
Data Governance	Residency, masking, encryption	Managed by Security & Compliance
Operational Governance	Dashboards, alert hygiene, SLOs	Central Grafana + SRE process
Audit & Reporting	Compliance scorecards, cost tracking	Monthly governance reports
Continuous Improvement	Update standards, optimize retention	Quarterly CCoE review

In short:

Centralized observability governance = standards + automation + enforcement + continuous measurement.

It ensures that all environments (multi-cloud + on-prem) remain observable, compliant, and cost-efficient — under one unified enterprise control plane.

Perfect 👍 — let’s go deep step-by-step on how to design and implement centralized observability across multi-cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) and on-prem environments.

🎯 Objective

Enable a single pane of glass for logs, metrics, and traces across heterogeneous environments, ensuring unified governance, visibility, and compliance.

🧩 1. Problem Context

In a multi-cloud + on-prem setup:

• Each cloud has its own observability stack:

  • Azure → Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics

  • AWS → CloudWatch, X-Ray

  • GCP → Cloud Operations Suite (Stackdriver)

  • On-Prem → Prometheus, Grafana, ELK

Each works well within its own boundary, but enterprises need:

• Cross-cloud visibility

• Unified dashboards

• Central alerting & SLOs

• Governed access & data retention

🧭 2. Step-by-Step Approach

Step 1️⃣: Define Observability Domains

Break it down into three pillars:

• Logs (App, System, Audit)

• Metrics (Performance, Infra, SLIs)

• Traces (Distributed transaction tracing)

Each domain will have a collector, transport, and central sink.

Step 2️⃣: Standardize on OpenTelemetry (OTel)

Use OpenTelemetry (OTel) as a common instrumentation and data pipeline layer across all environments.

• Deploy OTel agents or collectors on all workloads (cloud & on-prem).

• Configure them to export data to a centralized backend (instead of each cloud-native monitor).

• Benefit:

  • Unified data model

  • Vendor-neutral

  • Cloud-agnostic observability

Example:

[Application] -> [OTel Collector] -> [Central Observability Platform]

Step 3️⃣: Use a Central Aggregation Platform

Choose one enterprise-grade aggregator as your single source of truth for observability:

Option 1: Grafana Cloud / Grafana Enterprise Stack

• Centralized dashboards (Grafana)

• Logs (Loki)

• Metrics (Prometheus)

• Traces (Tempo)

• Works across multi-cloud and on-prem seamlessly

Option 2: ELK / OpenSearch Stack

• Logstash or FluentBit as collectors

• Elasticsearch / OpenSearch as data store

• Kibana / OpenSearch Dashboards for visualization

Option 3: Commercial tools

• Datadog / New Relic / Dynatrace / Splunk Observability Cloud

• Direct multi-cloud integration

• SaaS-based, already centralized

Step 4️⃣: Implement Unified Data Flow

For each environment:

Environment	Local Collector	Data Transport	Central Sink
Azure	OTel Collector → Event Hub	Kafka / HTTP	Grafana / ELK
AWS	OTel Collector → Kinesis	Kafka / HTTP	Grafana / ELK
GCP	OTel Collector → Pub/Sub	Kafka / HTTP	Grafana / ELK
On-Prem	Prometheus / FluentBit	Kafka / HTTP	Grafana / ELK

Kafka (or Confluent Cloud) acts as a message bus between clouds and the central platform.

Step 5️⃣: Centralized Governance & Access Control

Governance Layers:

• Data Classification: Tag logs and traces with source, tenant, and sensitivity.

• Access Control:

  • Integrate Grafana / Kibana with Azure AD / Okta / LDAP.

  • RBAC by environment, team, and data type.

• Retention Policy: Define log retention per compliance (e.g., SEBI/RBI for banking: 7 years for audit logs).

• Masking & PII Governance: Use FluentBit or OTel processors to mask sensitive data at collection time.

Step 6️⃣: Unified Alerting & SLOs

• Define global SLOs (e.g., API Latency < 300ms, Error Rate < 1%)

• Configure alerts centrally (Grafana Alerting / PagerDuty / ServiceNow)

• Alerts route to respective CloudOps/DevOps teams automatically

Step 7️⃣: Enable FinOps & Operational Insights

• Combine observability data + cost data from each cloud.

• Build unified FinOps dashboards in Grafana or Power BI.

• Helps measure:

  • Cloud spend vs performance

  • Environment utilization

  • SLA adherence

Step 8️⃣: Hybrid Deployment Architecture (Example)

              ┌────────────────────────┐
              │ Central Observability  │
              │ (Grafana + Loki + ELK) │
              └──────────┬─────────────┘
                         │
         ┌───────────────┼────────────────┐
         │               │                │
    [Azure OTel]     [AWS OTel]      [GCP OTel]
         │               │                │
         ▼               ▼                ▼
   Event Hub        Kinesis Stream     Pub/Sub
         │               │                │
         └──────────────► Kafka ◄─────────┘
                         │
                         ▼
                    Central Platform

🧱 3. Governance Framework for Observability

Governance Area	Description	Enforcement
Instrumentation Standards	Define consistent OTel SDK usage	Architecture Guilds
Tagging Policy	Every log/metric tagged with app, env, region	OTel processors
Data Retention	Logs: 7 yrs, Metrics: 90 days	Index lifecycle policy
Access Control	RBAC via Azure AD SSO	Grafana/Kibana config
Data Residency	Logs stay in-country for compliance	Region-specific storage
Change Management	Observability configs in Git	GitOps pipeline

✅ 4. Outcome

• Unified visibility across Azure, AWS, GCP, and On-prem

• Centralized alerting, governance, and auditability

• Cloud-agnostic observability using OpenTelemetry + Grafana / ELK

• Supports compliance (RBI, SEBI, GDPR, ISO 27001)