My day started off with an innocent question, from an innocent soul. “Hey Charity, is profiling a pillar?” I hadn’t even had my coffee yet. “Someone was just telling me that profiling is the fourth pillar of observability now. I said I think profiling is a great tool, but I don’t know if it quite…

Charity's platform is a central hub for nonprofit organizations, volunteers, and philanthropists, offering insights into charitable initiatives, fundraising strategies, and social impact projects. Through articles, success stories, and fundraising guides, Charity offers insights into effective nonprofit management, donor engagement, and community outreach efforts. Readers can learn about nonprofit governance, grant writing, and advocacy campaigns to support causes they care about and make a positive difference in the world.

Charity

A critical examination of the "three pillars of observability" (metrics, logs, traces) framework, arguing it's primarily a marketing construct that leads to expensive, siloed tooling. The piece advocates for unified storage models (observability 2.0) that treat all telemetry signals as interconnected structured data, eliminating the need to hop between separate systems. It clarifies that OpenTelemetry uses "signals" as the technical term, not "pillars," and explains how modern observability tools can store data once while deriving multiple signal types from the same source, reducing costs and cognitive load.

The Pillar Is A Lie

“But OpenTelemetry FORCES you to use three pillars”

I get your point but you are arguing that people are talking about pillars for marketing reasons while this article is the same thing but for your product. 😂
And yours isn’t cheap either 130$ a month lol. (But it has a free plan)

ex instana here: you forgot the fourth pillar - always on profiling &lt;3

Its all well and good having one source, but how does this work for real time metrics or alerts? Or metrics which have different security profiles depending on the data within?
As always the problem is that there isn’t a fit all approach.