You’ve got dashboards. You’ve got alerts. You’ve got logs going back six months. But can you answer this one question?
“Who accessed this data, and were they supposed to?”
Welcome to the next era of observability: auditable observability — where what you collect isn’t the only concern. It’s about who sees it, how it’s protected, and what trails they leave behind.
And if you think your observability stack is ready, think again.
The Ugly Truth About Modern Observability
Observability has evolved fast. In every SRE and DevOps team I know, there’s a rich landscape of:
- Prometheus for metrics ✅
- Loki or Elasticsearch for logs ✅
- Tempo or Jaeger for traces ✅
- Grafana dashboards on top ✅
What’s missing?
Access control. Audit trails. Data governance.
Here’s what that looks like in real life:
- A junior engineer accidentally sees production logs from a different tenant.
- An on-call rotation includes people who can query everything.
- Nobody knows who queried sensitive traces — because there’s no log of queries at all.
- An auditor asks you for proof that no one tampered with historical metrics… and you come up blank.
Observability without auditability is a security risk in disguise.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
Regulations like SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR aren’t just legal footnotes — they’re expectations:
- Immutable audit logs must be stored securely.
- Access to observability data must be logged and governed.
- Personal data in logs must be protected, redacted, or deleted on request.
If your observability stack can’t answer:
- “Who accessed logs from this time window?”
- “Can we prove this trace wasn’t altered?”
- “Which team owns this metric?”
…then you’re flying blind in the eyes of auditors, security teams, and your own customers.
Observability Was Built for Visibility — Not Auditability
Most open-source tools weren’t built with multi-tenancy or compliance in mind.
Take Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo:
- They’re great at ingesting data.
- They’re okay at organizing it by labels.
- They’re terrible at controlling who can access what.
RBAC in Grafana helps — but only at the dashboard level.
It doesn’t restrict queries. It doesn’t filter log lines. It doesn’t know about labels that matter to your platform (e.g. tenant_id, team, region, sensitivity=high).
So most teams try to patch it:
- Build reverse proxies that inject tenant labels.
- Run a Grafana per customer or per team.
- Hope everyone plays nice with naming conventions.
It’s fragile. It’s hard to maintain. And it scales poorly.
The Shift Toward Auditable Observability
In 2025, the trend is clear:
- Observability is no longer just about uptime.
- It’s part of your security surface.
- It must be auditable, accountable, and access-controlled.
Leading teams are asking:
- “Can we enforce RBAC or LBAC on observability data itself?”
- “Do our logs have traceability and tamper-resistance?”
- “Are our metrics labeled in a way that enables per-tenant access control?”
These aren’t nice-to-haves anymore. They’re table stakes — especially for:
- Multi-tenant platforms
- Enterprise customers
- Healthcare, fintech, and regulated industries
- Security-conscious orgs under zero-trust mandates
What Auditable Observability Looks Like
Here’s what good looks like in 2025:
✅ Logs, metrics, and traces are labeled by tenant, team, and sensitivity
✅ Access to data is scoped by labels, roles, and tokens
✅ All queries are logged, audit trails are immutable
✅ Data is stored in long-term object storage with WORM (Write Once, Read Many) policies
✅ Observability is integrated into compliance reports and security reviews
How We Solved It
This problem frustrated us for way too long.
We had all the right tools — but no way to control or audit observability data access at the level we needed.
So we built usegiam.com — a lightweight access control platform that brings observability governance to your stack.
🔐 What it does:
- Enforce who can access what, based on labels in Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, and Thanos and more
- Add query filters automatically based on the user/team/service
- Audit all queries - with tamper-resistant trails
- Integrate with your SSO and RBAC provider
- Deploy as a proxy in front of your observability backends — no vendor lock-in
Built for SREs. Loved by compliance teams.
No need to go Enterprise just to keep your data safe.
Why Now?
You wouldn’t ship code without access control.
You wouldn’t expose S3 buckets without IAM.
So why are we still exposing logs and metrics to everyone?
With the rise of platform engineering, multi-tenant environments, and cloud-native complexity, observability is security-critical infrastructure.
And the teams that realize this first?
They’re going to be the ones who sleep best during the next incident — or audit.
TL;DR
- Observability data is sensitive — and often unprotected.
- Most stacks don’t enforce proper access control or audit trails.
- Regulations require logs and metrics to be immutable, scoped, and monitored.
- You need observability that’s not just visible — but auditable.
👉 If this hits close to home, try usegiam.com.
Start making your observability stack secure, compliant, and access-aware.
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