The Platform Engineer's Playbook: Mastering OpenTelemetry & Compliance with Mezmo and Dynatrace

The rise of platform engineering has put a new team at the center of the developer experience. These teams are tasked with building the "paved road" for developers, which includes providing a robust, self-service observability stack. However, they face a dual mandate: provide a great developer experience and manage the ever-growing costs and complexity of the tools involved.

This mandate becomes particularly challenging as organizations modernize. Platform teams are often responsible for the entire observability bill, making them acutely sensitive to cost overruns. As they guide the organization's move to standards like OpenTelemetry (OTEL), they face the immense operational burden of managing a fleet of collectors and ensuring consistent implementation. On top of that, they must solve complex compliance requirements, like identifying and masking sensitive PII that may not conform to standard field names—a common gap in many data pipelines.

This is the platform engineer's dilemma: how do you enable hundreds of development teams while maintaining central control over cost, compliance, and standards?

The Solution: A Central Control Plane for Observability

Mezmo provides the centralized control plane that platform teams need to manage observability at scale, especially in a Dynatrace and OTEL environment.

1. Tame Your OpenTelemetry Fleet: OTEL is the future of instrumentation, but managing a fleet of collectors and ensuring consistent configuration across hundreds of services is a massive operational burden. Mezmo simplifies this by acting as a central processing destination for your OTEL data. Instead of managing complex filtering and routing rules across your entire collector fleet, you can manage them in one place: the Mezmo pipeline. This dramatically simplifies fleet management and ensures all data is processed consistently before being sent to Dynatrace.
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2. Solve for Advanced Compliance & PII: Standard PII masking often fails when sensitive data appears in non-standard fields, leading to significant compliance gaps. Mezmo addresses this with a suite of data processing tools. Our PII processor can detect and redact sensitive data, and for more complex cases, you can build custom processors to handle any data structure. By processing this data before it even reaches Dynatrace, you ensure compliance is handled automatically and consistently.
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3. Move from Hard Quotas to Smart Guardrails: What happens when a development team's service gets noisy and exceeds its logging quota? Simply dropping their logs creates a poor experience and introduces risk. Mezmo allows you to implement intelligent guardrails.
   
   • Throttling & Usage Quotas: Prevent runaway data ingestion from a single bursty workload.
   • Data Profiling: Proactively provide teams with insights into their noisiest data sources so they can optimize their own applications.
   • Usage-based Metrics: Use Mezmo to create metrics about data usage itself and send them to a data warehouse, enabling sophisticated chargeback or showback models for your platform.

Better Together: The Platform Team's Win-Win

With Mezmo and Dynatrace, platform teams can deliver a world-class observability service.

• Developers get fast, easy onboarding via OpenTelemetry and the powerful analytics of Dynatrace to self-serve their troubleshooting needs.
• The Platform Team gets centralized control over cost, data quality, and compliance, turning them from gatekeepers into enablers.

Right Solutions for Scale

Give your platform team the right solutions to build a scalable, cost-effective, and compliant observability practice. By using Mezmo as the intelligent control plane for your Dynatrace environment, you can accelerate your OpenTelemetry adoption, solve your toughest compliance challenges, and provide a developer experience that doesn't break the bank.

Learn more and get started with a free 30-day trial of Mezmo here.