Summary
Pure Storage enables open, vendor-agnostic observability across all platforms, empowering organizations to build operational resilience, meet regulatory demands, and reduce downtime without sacrificing flexibility or control.
In a world where threats are becoming more sophisticated, from ransomware to complex multi-layered outages, the ability to detect and respond swiftly has never been more important.
“Few things are more expensive than downtime. According to recent research, the average cost of downtime has inched as high as $9,000 per minute for large organizations. For higher-risk enterprises like finance and healthcare, downtime can eclipse $5 million an hour in certain scenarios, and that’s not including any potential fines or penalties.”
–David Flower, President and CEO, Volt Active Data, Inc.
Figure 1: Time to detection vs. consequences to business.
But here’s the real challenge: Many organizations still struggle to access the right data, let alone make sense of it across their infrastructure, applications, and services. Observability starts with high-fidelity, trusted telemetry, and that’s exactly where Pure Storage comes in.
Our arrays deliver rich, consistent, and standards-based metrics that help customers detect issues early, correlate performance across environments, and act with clarity. And for organizations building or evolving their observability strategy, our Advanced Services team is available to provide expert guidance, from aligning data sources to accelerating confident decision-making.
Resilience Requires Visibility. Observability Is the Backbone
Resilience is no longer optional. Whether you’re navigating rising cybersecurity threats, ensuring compliance with tightening regulatory frameworks like NIST and DORA, or simply working to deliver reliable services to your customers, the ability to observe, measure, and act quickly is paramount.
But observability isn’t a product. It’s a strategy. It’s a decision just as critical as choosing your database, your cloud architecture, or your backup plan. And it shouldn’t come with lock-in.
At Pure Storage, we believe observability should adapt to your ecosystem, not the other way around. That’s why we offer an open, standards-driven approach and strategic consultancy services to give you full control over how and where you consume telemetry. Whether you’re integrating with Pure1®, Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, or another platform, Pure Storage provides rich, accessible metrics without dictating how you use them.
The Real Value of Observability
Observability isn’t just about monitoring storage metrics; it’s about empowering teams to connect dots across infrastructure, applications, and business processes in real time. It helps organizations:
- Detect ransomware early via behavioral anomalies
- Accelerate root-cause analysis across silos
- Improve uptime and reliability metrics
- Meet the expectations of regulatory frameworks for operational resilience, such as DORA, NIST, and FFIEC
But here’s the nuance: No single observability platform fits every organization. Choosing one should be as intentional as selecting a database—factoring in performance, scale, ecosystem compatibility, and long-term goals.
Our Advanced Services teams work with customers every day to navigate these decisions. Whether you’re building your first observability strategy or integrating storage insights into an existing platform, we bring the experience to help align technical decisions with business priorities.
Open by Design: Metrics Where You Need Them
Pure Storage gives customers the freedom to choose the right platform for their operational model, risk profile, and regulatory obligations.
We meet customers where their data is, on-prem, in the cloud, or even in air-gapped environments.
- OpenMetrics support: Export metrics in a standardized format widely compatible with leading observability platforms.
- Native integrations: Pure Storage integrates seamlessly with Prometheus, Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry receivers, and more.
- Broad product coverage: Metrics available from FlashArray™, FlashBlade®, Pure Storage Cloud™, and Pure1®.
- Dark-site support: Our architecture ensures secure, controlled exports. Ideal for sensitive or regulated environments.
- Advanced Services support: Our teams provide expert consultancy and guidance to help you define, design, and operationalize your observability strategy.
You can get started with the FlashArray OpenMetrics Exporter (Pure Storage customer login required).
Figure 2: Custom dashboard correlating metrics from FlashArray, Oracle, ESXi, and Linux.
This blog demonstrates how SQL Server database administrators can correlate data with FlashArray.
The Business Value of Open Observability
1. Faster Detection = Lower Downtime
In real-world environments, customers who integrate Pure Storage metrics into their observability stacks have seen 30%–50% reductions in mean time to resolution (MTTR). When every second matters, early detection at the infrastructure level prevents cascading failures.
2. Built for Operational Resilience
Storage-layer telemetry offers early insight into performance anomalies and capacity trends. In the context of operational resilience, this enables faster response to ransomware indicators, cloud outages, or hardware degradation, well before application performance is impacted.
Increasingly, observability is part of broader resilience initiatives as organizations strengthen their ability to withstand and recover from adverse events, from supply chain disruption to natural disasters to AI-driven ransomware.
3. Compliance-ready from the Start
With DORA coming into effect, financial institutions and service providers face pressure to demonstrate traceability, robustness, and timely incident response. Open observability platforms fed by standard formats like OpenMetrics simplify compliance reporting, SLA validation, and real-time health monitoring.
As financial services firms race toward DORA compliance, Pure Storage makes it easy to plug infrastructure data into platforms already used for audit trails and operational oversight.
Figure 3: Workflow from detection to resolution (Source: Gartner).
Real-world Adoption: How Customers Are Using It
Cloud platform provider: Advanced Services designed and delivered a comprehensive observability platform for S3 object storage, providing real-time and historical insights into performance, request patterns, and capacity usage at both array and bucket levels. The solution enabled proactive service management, resource optimization, and supported chargeback and usage analytics at scale.
Public sector agency: Advanced Services architects integrated FlashBlade OpenMetrics into Prometheus in an air-gapped environment, enabling proactive issue detection while maintaining security posture.
Financial services firm: Advanced Services helped the firm with a proof of concept through a teach-to-fish approach to independently deploy a vendor-agnostic observability platform. Successfully pulling and correlating VMware and FlashArray metrics for unified infrastructure monitoring empowered the firm’s team with operational insight, self-sufficiency, and scalable monitoring capabilities.
Figure 4: In this simulated ransomware attack, metrics show the correlation between a VM guest with increased CPU, increase in array utilization, and decrease in data reduction ratio.
Observability Is a Strategic Choice
When choosing an observability strategy, the real value lies in correlation across layers: storage, infrastructure, application, and business. That only works when telemetry is:
- Open, so it integrates with what you already use
- Accessible, even in complex environments like dark sites
- Standardized, to ensure scale and interoperability
Our vendor-agnostic philosophy supports our customers’ broader mission: whether that’s combating cyber espionage, achieving resilience in regulated industries, or preparing for AI-driven threats.
Figure 5: Observability metrics can be used to identify anomalies across platforms.
Use observability to find potential matching anomalies across multiple platforms. The example above helped identify the root cause of Oracle database wait times caused by a configuration drift where the Oracle host filesystems were also mounted to a FlashBlade array.
As you evaluate your own observability posture, treat it as you would a data platform or security solution. Choose based on fit, flexibility, and future-readiness, and not what’s bundled in.
Learn more about how Pure Storage can help integrate telemetry into your existing observability ecosystem. Contact our Advanced Services team or explore our OpenMetrics Exporter documentation (Pure Storage customer login required).
Need Help Getting Started? We’re Here
Pure Storage offers advanced services to accelerate observability adoption, whether you’re integrating into existing tooling or building dashboards from scratch. You decide how much help you need.
Whether you’re scaling operations, securing environments, or preparing for new regulatory standards, our open observability approach helps you move faster, safer, and smarter.
Reach out for a demo and learn how observability can provide critical insights in your environment.
Move Faster
Learn more about Pure Storage Advanced Services.
