Observability Governance & Internal Developer Portal

Problem

Observability usage ballooned alongside TIDAL’s subscriber growth, but budgets and accountability lagged. Teams lacked visibility into the cost of their telemetry choices, and runbooks lived outside their daily workflow.

My Role

I directed the observability roadmap, stacked-ranked investments with product leadership, and paired with platform engineers who extended the IDP. I also set the policies for log governance, coached teams on cost reviews, and reported savings to finance.

Solution

• Added “observability cost per service” to the IDP alongside SLOs, deployments, and ownership metadata.
• Implemented log-governance guardrails that enforce sampling policies, retention tiers, and alerting standards based on service tier.
• Built dashboards that correlate telemetry volume with customer and infrastructure signals, helping teams reason about trade-offs.
• Automated DORA metric collection and surfaced it in the same portal so engineering leaders could balance speed with reliability.

Outcome

• Engineering teams became mindful of log volume and value, trimming redundant ingestion by 30% and lowering observability spend 12% without sacrificing coverage.
• Runbooks, telemetry, and cost data now co-exist, letting on-call engineers jump straight from an alert to remediation context.
• Product conversations reference the same metrics and budgets, improving prioritization of resilience work.

Technologies & Tools