The Case for Unified Observability in Complex Machine Development

Introduction

In today’s era of rapid technological advancement, defense organizations are developing increasingly complex systems, from air and missile defense networks to next-generation autonomous systems. These mission-critical platforms generate vast amounts of high-cardinality data, yet the legacy tools used to ingest, analyze, and review this telemetry are often designed for simpler commercial applications. Developing, testing, and operating these advanced defense systems demands observability solutions that go far beyond traditional IT monitoring tools.

To properly build and sustain these intricate systems, defense engineers have often been forced to create bespoke, in-house software solutions. While these systems may serve immediate operational needs, they come at a steep cost—diverting key engineers from core responsibilities, inflating budgets, and creating brittle, difficult-to-scale infrastructure. As defense programs expand and evolve, these legacy systems often break under operational demands, forcing teams to continuously rebuild telemetry and data review software from the ground up.

For defense systems to remain resilient, adaptive, and cost-effective, a new generation of observability software is required. This paper explores what sets advanced observability solutions apart from legacy monitoring tools, highlights emerging AI-powered observability capabilities, and examines how Sift’s comprehensive end-to-end observability stack addresses the critical challenges faced by defense organizations operating at the forefront of technological innovation.

Observability 101: More Than Just Monitoring

To understand why comprehensive observability is mission-critical for defense organizations, it is essential to distinguish between advanced observability solutions and outdated monitoring tools. Many defense programs still rely on static dashboards and rule-based alerting systems that were never designed to handle the dynamic, high-stakes environments of modern warfare. In reality, these tools create more problems than they solve.

When developing next-generation defense systems, one undeniable truth emerges: countless variables can—and will—fail, often in unpredictable ways.

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Observability in the defense sector refers to the software platforms engineers use to analyze, interpret, and act on the performance of their systems in real time. As the complexity of air and missile defense networks, ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) platforms, and hypersonic programs increases, effective management of their high-volume telemetry data is an absolute necessity. The right observability tools empower defense teams to rapidly detect anomalies, predict failures, and resolve mission-critical issues before they escalate into operational disruptions.

When developing next-generation defense systems, one undeniable truth emerges: countless variables can—and will—fail, often in unpredictable ways. This is where observability provides a decisive advantage, offering real-time insights and automated anomaly detection that enable proactive issue resolution. As the software underpinning defense platforms becomes more sophisticated, observability serves as the foundational element ensuring operational stability and resilience.

Beyond Basic Monitoring: The Power of Observability

While traditional monitoring tools have their place in controlled environments such as data centers, they are ill-equipped to handle the unpredictable challenges of real-world defense operations. Legacy platforms require engineers to predefine potential failure conditions, limiting their ability to respond to emergent threats and unknown anomalies.

For example, an air defense radar system may encounter interference or unexpected telemetry spikes during live operations. A monitoring tool can only detect anomalies it has been explicitly configured to track. Observability, on the other hand, leverages logs, metrics, and traces to automatically surface unknown issues, providing a holistic, real-time view of system performance. This proactive approach enables defense teams to maintain readiness and respond dynamically to evolving mission conditions.

In complex defense environments, observability provides:

• Automated anomaly detection to identify and diagnose performance issues without manual data review.
• Full-system visibility across interconnected defense networks, ensuring all telemetry data is integrated and contextualized.
• Proactive failure mitigation to reduce system downtime and maintain continuous mission readiness.

By going beyond basic monitoring, observability enables defense engineers to anticipate challenges before they become mission-critical failures, ensuring that defense platforms remain operational and effective in high-stakes scenarios.

The Observability Challenge: Why Defense Organizations Struggle to Implement It

Despite its clear advantages, observability adoption within the defense sector remains uneven. Developing and maintaining an effective observability stack is an immense challenge, requiring significant engineering resources and specialized expertise.

Many defense programs attempt to build their own observability solutions in-house, often resulting in:

• Siloed telemetry data that limits real-time decision-making capabilities.
• Fragmented toolchains that increase operational complexity and training requirements.
• Resource-intensive maintenance that diverts key personnel from strategic development efforts.

However, lessons from the IT sector demonstrate that fully integrated observability solutions can significantly enhance operational efficiency. Studies show that:

• 90% of IT professionals believe observability is important and strategic to their business, but only 26% said their observability practice was mature. 50% are currently implementing observability (New Relic).
• 91% of IT decision makers see observability as critical at every stage of the software lifecycle, citing the biggest benefits to planning and operations (New Relic).
• 92% of surveyed engineers believe observability tools enable more effective decision-making (Tanzu VMware).
• Advanced observability deployments can cut downtime costs by 90%, keeping costs down to $2.5M annually versus $23.8 million for observability beginners (Enterprise Strategy Group).

Observability for Defense Systems: Real-World Applications

To illustrate the critical role of observability in defense applications, consider the operational demands of integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) networks. These systems rely on continuous data streams from distributed radars, sensors, and interceptors, all of which must work in perfect synchronization to identify and neutralize threats in real time.

A monitoring tool can only detect anomalies it has been explicitly configured to track

Without a unified observability solution, defense operators are forced to manually sift through disjointed telemetry data, increasing response times and introducing operational blind spots. By implementing observability across IAMD networks, engineers gain:

• Real-time telemetry correlation across all sensor nodes and interceptor platforms.
• Automated fault detection to preemptively identify performance degradations in radar tracking and targeting systems.
• Historical data analysis to refine threat detection algorithms and optimize future engagements.

The same principles apply to other mission-critical defense platforms, including space-based reconnaissance systems, hypersonic weapon programs, and autonomous battlefield networks. Observability ensures that these cutting-edge systems operate with maximum efficiency, reducing operational risk and enhancing mission effectiveness.

The Pitfalls of Building Observability In-House

When companies attempt to develop their own bespoke observability solutions, they typically run headlong into a recurring set of challenges:

• Data Centralization: Mission-critical defense systems generate an unrelenting stream of high-frequency, high-cardinality data from multiple sensors, platforms, and subsystems. Ingesting and aggregating this data is only the first hurdle. Engineers must also normalize thousands of distinct schemas while ensuring everything remains time-aligned for accurate analysis. Without a scalable observability solution, latency issues can impede real-time decision-making.
• Usability for All Stakeholders: Many off-the-shelf observability tools cater to software engineers comfortable with complex query languages. However, defense programs require a collaborative, intuitive platform accessible to hardware engineers, operations analysts, and program managers alike. Bespoke observability tools often leave key stakeholders struggling to extract meaningful insights from mission-critical telemetry data.
• Testing as You Fly: Understanding system performance in real-world defense operations requires consistent observability from early development through live deployment. Without a unified observability solution, engineers may lack the ability to test under operational conditions, leading to blind spots that could jeopardize system reliability in the field.
• Maintainability: While developing an in-house observability solution may seem feasible at first, the ongoing resource burden quickly becomes unsustainable. As defense programs evolve, these systems require continuous updates and adaptations to new mission parameters. Many in-house solutions are designed for specific applications but struggle to scale across multiple platforms, leading to costly inefficiencie

The Limitations of IT Observability Tools

A common misconception in defense programs is that IT observability tools can adequately support complex, sensor-driven defense systems. While these tools may provide basic backend visibility, they fail to deliver the comprehensive insights necessary for mission success.

The speed and complexity of modern defense operations demand a fundamental rethinking of traditional observability stacks:

• Ingestion: Defense platforms require the ability to ingest high-cardinality telemetry data at high sampling rates, ensuring seamless performance even in contested or degraded environments.
• Storage: Defense telemetry data spans multiple time horizons, from real-time operational data to long-term historical analysis. Traditional IT data stores lack the speed and scale needed to support high-fidelity mission data.
• Visualization: Decision-making relies on cross-domain collaboration. Effective observability platforms must provide intuitive, advanced visualization tools that do not require specialized coding expertise, ensuring accessibility for all mission stakeholders.
• Alerting: Mission-critical systems require stateful alerts that account for multivariate conditions and real-world operational context. Traditional IT observability solutions often generate excessive, low-priority alerts, leading to alert fatigue and missed critical events.

Sift: Comprehensive Observability for What's Next

Sift is pioneering the next generation of machine development with the first unified observability stack purpose-built for hardware data. Founded by former SpaceX engineers with deep experience building reusable rockets, Sift is tailored for the unique challenges of complex, sensor-rich systems.

Sift is pioneering the next generation of machine development with the first unified observability stack purpose-built for hardware data.

Sift's platform is the only comprehensive solution that mitigates risk, automates data review, and provides complete visibility into operational hardware. Sift goes beyond the limits of traditional monitoring tools, putting previously inaccessible insights and capabilities into the hands of engineering teams.

By leveraging automatic data review, contextual alerting, low-latency ingestion, and the ability to test as you fly, Sift empowers engineers with complete situational awareness across their entire vehicle fleet. When the inevitable anomalies arise, Sift's powerful tooling helps teams quickly identify and resolve issues before they lead to costly mission failures.

Sift and the Future of AI-Powered Observability

In the rapidly evolving landscape of defense technology, AI holds the key to unlocking unprecedented levels of observability for mission-critical systems. However, effectively harnessing this power requires a meticulous approach and a robust data infrastructure capable of handling high-frequency, high-cardinality telemetry from air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains. Sift, with its unwavering commitment to simplifying complexity, stands at the forefront of this AI-driven revolution in defense observability.

To establish effective AI-driven observability models, the first crucial step is to centralize, normalize, and time-align telemetry data in a format that facilitates seamless model training. Sift's architecture, designed for mission-critical defense applications, achieves this by decoupling compute and storage while leveraging scalable, high-performance data structures. This ensures real-time data interoperability, supports AI-driven anomaly detection, and enables predictive maintenance at operational scale.

Realizing the full potential of AI in defense observability requires an unbundled database architecture capable of handling diverse workload requirements, from real-time operational monitoring to long-term forensic analysis. With Sift’s scalable data foundation in place, AI-driven techniques can drive transformative improvements in system reliability, anomaly detection, and performance monitoring. Sift's AI-powered features, such as automated anomaly detection, predictive system health monitoring, and assisted rule generation, not only surface emerging threats but also empower operators to define deterministic and probability-based decision models tailored to their mission objectives.

At the core of Sift's approach lies the belief that mission-critical telemetry data should be managed with simplicity and efficiency. By harnessing AI and natural language processing, Sift enables defense engineers, operators, and analysts to effortlessly query vast datasets and generate mission-relevant visualizations in real time. This intuitive approach to telemetry management democratizes observability, making it accessible across all levels of an organization. By simplifying complex mission data workflows and offering an end-to-end observability solution, Sift empowers defense teams to focus on their primary goal—ensuring mission success.

Observability as Ground Truth

When developing mission-critical defense systems, observability is not a luxury—it is a strategic necessity. Defense engineering teams require a single source of truth to effectively develop, test, and operate complex weapons systems, ISR platforms, and battlefield networks. Sift’s comprehensive observability platform provides this unified perspective, enabling defense teams to identify root causes of system anomalies with precision and speed.

Rather than forcing operators to manually correlate fragmented telemetry from disparate systems, Sift consolidates mission data into a single, actionable interface. Engineers and analysts gain clear, real-time insights, eliminating delays caused by siloed data sources and redundant troubleshooting efforts.

Sift’s workflow is designed to capture and centralize institutional knowledge, ensuring that valuable telemetry insights persist across system lifecycles, from R&D to operational deployment. With Sift, defense teams can collaborate seamlessly, address anomalies before they impact operations, and proactively mitigate risks that could compromise mission effectiveness.

• Streamlined Data Management and Accessibility: To ensure mission success, defense teams must be able to analyze all telemetry data their systems generate. This is especially critical for cutting-edge programs where no historical precedent exists. Sift’s observability platform provides full-spectrum data visibility while eliminating the noise and inefficiencies of legacy systems.
• Risk Mitigation for Mission Success: The potential for catastrophic mission failure keeps defense leaders awake at night. Relying on outdated monitoring tools that require predefined alert conditions leaves mission-critical systems vulnerable to the unknown. Sift’s automated data review, smart alerting, and anomaly detection capabilities allow teams to reduce operational risk, accelerate response times, and make high-confidence decisions under pressure.
• Comprehensive Fault Tolerance: Defense systems operating in denied or degraded environments require unparalleled fault tolerance. Achieving operational resilience demands continuous validation and verification of system behavior. Sift’s end-to-end observability enables rigorous testing and verification, ensuring systems meet stringent performance standards before deployment.‍
• Intelligent Data Storage and Retention: Unlike consumer-grade applications, defense telemetry requires long-term storage solutions that balance accessibility with security. Attempting to force mission-critical data into commercial-grade storage solutions results in inefficiencies and spiraling costs. Sift’s intelligent, scalable data storage framework ensures high-fidelity mission telemetry remains accessible for forensic analysis, operational improvements, and future capability development.

Simplicity Through Observability

Sift’s unified observability platform acts as a force multiplier for defense engineering teams. By delivering a comprehensive, fully integrated observability solution purpose-built for mission-critical systems, Sift eliminates the inefficiencies of fragmented toolchains and manual troubleshooting. With all telemetry data unified in one intuitive interface, defense teams can rapidly detect, analyze, and resolve system anomalies before they escalate into mission failures.

Beyond saving time and resources compared to in-house observability development, Sift’s automated workflows and AI-driven insights capture and retain institutional knowledge, enhancing collaboration across defense programs. Engineers and operators can dedicate more time to advancing mission capabilities instead of managing telemetry infrastructure.

As modern defense operations grow increasingly complex, investing in a scalable, AI-powered observability platform is no longer optional—it is an operational imperative. With the right observability tools in place, defense organizations can fortify their systems against mission failure, accelerate readiness timelines, and maintain technological superiority in a rapidly evolving threat landscape.

To learn how Sift can enhance observability for your mission-critical defense systems, schedule a demo with our team today.