In this episode of The New Stack Makers, our Publisher Alex Williams sits down with Raj Dutt, CEO and co-founder Grafana Labs, provider of the open source observability platform Grafana. They’re talking about creating a more seamless transition among observability, tracing, metrics and logs, across different data types and open source projects.

Observability and distributed tracing are intrinsically linked to reliability of increasingly distributed systems. Observability-driven development uses data and tooling to observe the state and behavior of a system to learn more about its patterns for weaknesses. Distributed tracing provides the metrics and logs that allow for diving into individual requests and to get closer to the problem. In this powerful pairing, observability happens at the event level, which drives your questions, and tracing happens at the request level, which helps answer them.