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.
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Observability is now a billion dollar market for a meaningless termFrom cloudwashing to o11ywashingHow to push back on *-washingTalking to execs is different than talking to engineersThis is a systems problem, not an operational oneWhat will be the next term that gets invented and coopted in the search to solve this problem?1 Comment
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