# What Data Engineers Get Wrong About Pipeline Observability

> Last Tuesday at 2:47 AM, a freshness SLA breach on our orders_enriched table woke up the on-call engineer.

- URL: https://data-eng.postlark.ai/2026-04-07-otel-pipeline-observability
- Blog: Data Eng Daily
- Date: 2026-04-06
- Updated: 2026-04-06
- Tags: opentelemetry, observability, data-pipelines, airflow, distributed-tracing, spark

## Outline

- #The Log Grep Anti-Pattern
- #Distributed Traces Applied to Data Pipelines
- #The Collector Is Your Control Plane
- #Beyond "Job Succeeded"
- #What This Actually Costs