I was just watching a panel on observability, with a handful of industry executives and experts who shall remain nameless and hopefully duly obscured—their identities are not the point, the point is that this is a mainstream view among engineering executives and my head is exploding. Scene: the moderator asked a fairly banal moderator-esque question…

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The term 'observability' has been co-opted by vendors to mean traditional monitoring tools that only track system uptime, losing its original meaning of understanding service quality from each customer's perspective. This 'o11ywashing' mirrors the 'cloudwashing' phenomenon where vendors rebrand existing products with trendy terminology. True observability requires unified telemetry combining app, business, and system data to slice by customer ID and other dimensions, not just separate metrics, logs, and traces. Engineering executives need better education on this distinction to avoid investing in rebranded monitoring tools that can't solve their actual problems.

From Cloudwashing to O11ywashing

Observability is now a billion dollar market for a meaningless term

Talking to execs is different than talking to engineers

This is a systems problem, not an operational one

What will be the next term that gets invented and coopted in the search to solve this problem?

<p>There’s also devopswashing. When a company supposedly seeks a DevOps Engineer, but all the tasks, infrastructure and culture is 90’s System Administrator work.</p>
