A pipeline that returns 200 is not a pipeline that works. The four decisions behind running OpenTelemetry on AWS with ADOT, the CloudWatch OTLP endpoint limits that drop data without erroring, and how to catch the failures before a colleague does.
Green DAGs and wrong numbers are the same morning. This is how to build a data pipeline operations dashboard around the four questions that actually matter, where each signal comes from, and how to turn the panels into alerts that fire before your users notice.
Metrics tell you that something is wrong. Traces tell you where. Logs tell you why. Use them in that order and each step narrows the search — start with logs and you are grepping a firehose. Here is what each one is actually for, and the field that connects all three.