Beyond real-time alerting, monitoring supports long-term visibility, compliance, and forensics through disciplined reporting and archiving practices. In this episode, we discuss how monitoring data is structured into actionable reports for various audiences—technical teams, executives, and auditors—highlighting trends, risk areas, and remediation status over time. We also cover the importance of log retention policies, especially for compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS, which often require logs to be securely stored for months or years. Archiving ensures that log data is preserved in a tamper-resistant format for incident response, litigation holds, or internal investigations. These long-term practices build a historical baseline and ensure that evidence isn’t lost when it’s most needed. Monitoring isn’t just for today—it’s also your memory, your audit trail, and your regulatory safety net.