Observability Across DevOps, SRE, SecOps, & FinOps

IT Observability has evolved significantly from its roots as a purely technical monitoring function. In today’s complex digital landscape dominated by public and hybrid environments, it is no longer enough to simply monitor IT systems. True strategic advantage comes from embedding observability insights into the core operational and strategic practices of an organization such as DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Security Operations (SecOps), and Financial Operations (FinOps). This will transform a reactive troubleshooting aid into a proactive capability that drives efficiency, resilience, security, and cost-effectiveness across the organization.

How Observability improves DevOps agility and code quality

The DevOps methodology is primarily focused on delivering high quality software quicker. DevOps can gain significant benefits from observability, specifically in the areas of software quality.

By incorporating observability into deployment processes, IT teams immediately see the impact of code changes and can quickly spot and address any issues. For example, you can set up real-time feedback loops that help your team see how code changes impact metrics such API response times, error rates, resource usage so you can fix problems and improve code faster.

This is particularly important for two key reasons. First the rise of AI-generated code, which may not always be optimized and can introduce performance issues. Second, the dynamic nature of cloud-native environments, where applications are frequently updated.

Integrating observability into CI/CD pipelines enables automated performance validation before an application goes live, ensuring new features meet performance criteria before reaching users. This proactive approach not only maintains system stability while improving time to market, but also improves customer experience.

Empowering SRE teams through data observability

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a practice that is responsible for the performance, availability and reliability of digital services. To the end consumer, this means that the services they use are regularly up and running, respond quickly and provide an expected service level. Ultimately such a positive experience drives customer loyalty and business success.

However, many organizations still struggle with SRE. This 2025 SRE Report found that over 65% of respondents frequently feel pressured to prioritize release schedules over reliability. 53% also agree that poor performance is as harmful as downtime.

SRE practices rely heavily on observability data (metrics, logs, traces) to define and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs). Thus an approach that combines historical trends analysis and predictive analytics of such observability data can accelerate root cause analysis and reduce the Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) of an issue. It can also help SRE teams to proactively detect and halt potential issues before they happen. The observability insights can also assist in capacity planning and identifying areas for performance enhancement.

Strengthening SecOps with security observability

There is a well-known saying within the security industry – you cannot secure what you cannot see. According to this report, the global security analytics market size is projected to grow at a CAGR of 24.6% from 2024 to 2030. It is no surprise that observability is beginning to converge with security, leading to the rise of “Security Observability” or “Security Analytics” within SecOps practices.

By correlating your systems’ operational data (metrics, logs, traces) with security event data from sources like SIEMs, you can have a more contextualized view of their security posture. This integrated perspective enables them to:

• Detect threats earlier and more accurately by identifying anomalies and potential threats in real time
• Swiftly respond to security incidents by eliminating security event floods and false positives to pinpoint the root security issue
• Continuously monitor metrics, logs and data across your applications and infrastructure to uphold security compliance across specifications such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS

Optimizing FinOps costs using observability insights

According to the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report, cloud spend is expected to increase by 28% in the coming year. To counteract cost concerns, organizations are expanding FinOps teams and focusing on cost optimization to recapture the 27% of cloud spend that continues to be wasted.

To be effective in this endeavour, you will need to have a very good understanding about your cloud operating environment i.e. deep visibility into cloud compute and service usage, identification of poorly written/configured applications, over/under-provisioning, spikes etc. Observability metrics, logs and traces can provide insights and visibility into overall cloud resource utilization that can help in accurate cost allocation, reducing waste and overall cloud cost optimization.

From an implementation angle, the vendor-neutral open source project OpenCost can be used to connect observability and FinOps. OpenCost is a real-time solution for measuring and allocating cloud infrastructure and container costs for Kubernetes environments.

SUSE observability for DevOps, SRE, SecOps, & FinOps

SUSE Observability is a comprehensive solution designed to give IT teams full visibility into their cloud-native environments, enabling faster problem resolution, better resource optimization, and more informed decision-making. It brings together metrics, logs, and traces into a unified platform, allowing it to monitor the health, performance, and security of applications and infrastructure across hybrid, multi-cloud and remote edge environments.

Integrating SUSE Observability insights into DevOps, SRE, SecOps, and FinOps, provides many benefits. It enhances DevOps agility through faster feedback loops and CI/CD validation, empowers SRE teams with data for improved reliability and quicker issue resolution, strengthens SecOps by correlating operational and security data for better threat detection, and provides FinOps teams with essential visibility to optimize cloud costs and resource utilization. This integrated approach drives efficiency, resilience, security, and cost-effectiveness across the organization.

Download our whitepaper to explore how SUSE Observability helps modern IT teams optimize performance, security, and costs.