The category of software observability came of age during the peak of digital transformation, a time when backend services were scaling and shifting toward microservices, systems became increasingly distributed and the key challenge was tracing root causes of latency, outages and errors across sprawling infrastructure. If an API call failed or a service slowed down, engineers wanted to know why.
That mindset led to a telemetry arms race. Collect everything, store everything, query everything and hope answers would emerge through traces, logs…
