The Pillar Is A Lie

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.