Observability vs audit logging: what’s the difference?
Observability tools (e.g. Datadog, New Relic, Grafana) help you understand and debug your systems with logs, metrics, and traces. They’re not designed to be tamper-evident audit trails with guaranteed data residency and long retention.
When observability is the right tool
Use observability platforms for operational insight: latency, errors, request flows, and recent logs. Retention is often short; the goal is debugging and alerting, not legal or compliance evidence.
When you need an audit log
For SOC 2, GDPR, and security reviews, auditors expect an audit trail: who did what, when, and where, with cryptographic integrity (e.g. hash chains), defined retention, and data residency. That’s a different design than general-purpose observability.
Using both
Many teams use observability for operations and a dedicated audit-logging product for compliance. HyreLog focuses on the latter: immutable, region-aware audit trails and auditor-ready exports.