Amrith Raj

Protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data in logs is crucial for supporting privacy and compliance. While Dynatrace OneAgent can mask data at capture/source, sensitive information like social security numbers (SSNs), payment details, IP addresses, or email addresses might still get through — especially when logs are ingested via other mechanisms such as directly using an API, via Fluent Bit, Cribl, or using the OpenTelemetry collector.

Let’s say you have a nightly account update batch job that processes user transactions, recalculates balances, and synchronizes data across services in a financial application. If it fails or gets stuck and consumes so many resources that your service degrades, you’ll suffer significant business impact. Every second of such an incident can lead to customer frustration, SLA breaches, and lost revenue.

More organizations are adopting the OpenTelemetry observability standard in pursuit of a vendor-neutral solution to manual instrumentation, sending data to multiple vendors, and gaining insight into third-party services. But as most developers know, it’s the observability backend that reveals the value of your data and instrumentation strategy.