Observability Summit North America 2026

Modern observability stacks excel at capturing signals about infrastructure health, application performance, and request flows. Yet one critical class of decisions remains largely invisible: authorization.
In distributed systems, authorization decisions increasingly determine not only whether an action succeeds, but if data is accessed, tools are invoked, or automated agents are allowed to act. These decisions are often evaluated outside application code using Policy as Code frameworks, yet their outcomes are rarely observable in a structured, privacy preserving way.
In this session, we explore how Policy as Code, Open Policy Agent, and the OpenTelemetry project can be combined to treat authorization decisions as observable events. We examine what it means to observe a decision without logging sensitive inputs, how decision structure differs from traditional metrics and traces, and why decision level observability is becoming essential in cloud native and AI driven systems.
Attendees will leave with a conceptual framework for thinking about authorization as telemetry, and a clearer understanding of where observability is heading as systems become more autonomous and policy driven.