Observability is the difference between debugging by guess and debugging by data. The best teams instrument from day one — and they instrument the right things.
The four planes of observability
- Technical — latency, error rate, saturation. The classic SRE plane.
- Business — sign-ups, activations, retention, MRR — the metrics your CEO checks.
- Behavioural — page views, journey funnels, feature adoption.
- AI — every prompt, response, tool call, cost and quality signal.
Logs are evidence, not narration
Most teams over-log and under-think. We treat logs as evidence — structured, indexed, retained intentionally — not as a stream of comments narrating the code.
Traces are now mandatory
In a service-oriented world, traces are not optional. Every cross-service call, every AI call, every database call — traced and stitched into a single timeline.
