Observability's past, present, and future

Summary

Observability's Past, Present, and Future 05 Jan, 2026 In my last post, Round Two, I wrote about my career, my passion for dev tools, and my decision to start a new company focused on observability. I also wrote about my frustration with observability as it exists today. Why are the tools and workflows so bad? Why does it feel like so much work? In today's post, I want to unpack that frustration by looking at observability in historical context. I'll examine observability through a simple three-part lens: its past, present, and future. My goal is to understand and explain: Why observability emerged in the first place How observability evolved into the mess it is today Why, despite all the progress we've made, maintaining reliable systems is still SO hard in 2026 Let's go! PART 1: OBSERVABILITY'S PAST To understand observability, it helps to look at the environment that gave rise to it. In the early 2010s, software engineers faced a crisis: with the rise of cloud computing, containers, and microservices, apps were becoming increasingly complex - too complex for any individual to fully understand. Meanwhile, CI/CD was becoming more common, which meant an increase in the rate at which changes were deployed to production. The result: more frequent bugs and outages. Suddenly, our old reliability playbook stopped working. We couldn't predict all the edge-cases, let alone write tests for them. Failure modes increasingly emerged from the complex interaction between services. When it came to root-cause analysis, logs and basic metrics were no longer enough. Fortunately, the industry found a solution. It came in two parts: a tool and a philosophy. The tool was distributed tracing. After a quiet start in 2010, distributed tracing grew steadily over the ensuing decade until it was essentially ubiquitous: 2010: Google publishes Dapper, the first major paper on distributed tracing. 2012: Twitter introduces Zipkin, inspired by Dapper. 2015: Honeycomb, one of the first managed trac...