Building an Observability Module for Platform Engineering with Code to Cloud

[kevinevans1]

Overview

As part of the Code to Cloud initiative, our platform engineering team needed to standardize and simplify how we deliver observability across internal development platforms. Observability is a critical component of any modern platform—it enables teams to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize systems proactively and at scale.

We set out to build an Observability Module that would serve as a reusable, extensible, and accessible starting point for platform teams adopting CNCF-native observability tooling.

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What Is Observability in Platform Engineering?

Observability is the ability to understand the internal state of a system based on the data it produces—primarily logs, metrics, and traces. In platform engineering, observability is a key design principle that helps platform teams and internal developers:
• Detect performance bottlenecks or failures before customers do
• Self-serve debugging without infrastructure access
• Maintain service level objectives (SLOs)
• Build reliable, scalable software on top of the platform

Observability is not a single tool—it is a collection of telemetry systems working together.

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Goals of the Observability Module
1. Comply with CNCF standards
2. Support Kubernetes-first environments
3. Educate users on observability tooling and patterns
4. Be easy to deploy, extend, and integrate into GitOps workflows
5. Be accessible to platform engineers, developers, and SREs

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Tools Used (Aligned with CNCF Landscape)

The module leverages these open-source, cloud-native tools:
• Metrics: Prometheus
• Tracing: OpenTelemetry with Jaeger
• Logging: Fluent Bit shipping logs to Loki
• Visualization: Grafana
• Pipeline Management: OpenTelemetry Collector

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Features of the Module
• Pre-configured dashboards and alert rules
• Terraform and Helm support for automated deployments
• Clean code with inline documentation and usage examples
• Default configurations for Kubernetes, but extensible to other environments
• Diagrams and markdown guides for easy onboarding

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Benefits
• Standardized telemetry stack across all environments
• Reduces time-to-observability for new services
• Improves incident response with richer context
• Enables self-service debugging for developers
• Encourages observability-first mindset in platform teams

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Where to Find It

Repository: https://github.com/codetocloud/platform-observability-module
Documentation: docs/observability/README.md within the repo