GDPR-Compliant Monitoring & Observability

Application logs and monitoring data are a frequently overlooked source of personal data. Error logs contain user email addresses, request logs include IP addresses and session tokens, database query logs expose customer records, and stack traces may reveal API keys and user identifiers. Monitoring platforms ingest massive volumes of this data continuously, making them one of the largest personal data processing activities in any technology organisation. When your monitoring platform is operated by a US company like Datadog or New Relic, every log line, trace, and metric containing personal data is processed on US infrastructure. European monitoring platforms keep your observability data within the EU, ensuring that the personal data flowing through your logs and metrics is protected by GDPR. This is especially important because log data is often retained for weeks or months for debugging purposes, creating a persistent store of personal data that requires GDPR-compliant retention and deletion policies.