After a particularly grueling Thursday spent troubleshooting a publish API outage last year, I remember turning to my colleague and saying, “There has to be a better way.” Four years into my software engineering career in fintech, and we were still piecing together information from disparate monitoring tools whenever something went wrong. That frustration kickstarted my two-month journey to build what’s now become our team’s most valuable asset: a comprehensive OpenObserve dashboard that’s transformed how we monitor our services.

Finding the Right Tool

After spending a few weekends researching options, I narrowed down our choices to three observability platforms. OpenObserve won out because it offered: