Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The recent announcement that OpenTelemetry (OTel) has achieved CNCF graduation further reinforces OTel’s credibility as the industry standard for vendor-neutral telemetry. As organizations increasingly adopt the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), the OTel Collector, and OTel SDKs, they need an observability platform that supports OTel-native data without sacrificing flexibility or portability.

If your.NET app talks to MongoDB, you almost certainly want to be able to measure DB performance so that you can effectively debug any performance issues you might run into. For that, you need to know which database command was running, how long it took, and whether this was a one-off blip or part of a broader pattern. Ideally, you also want to pivot from that trace to related errors and replays without stitching the story together by hand.

Most PR review tools answer one question: does this code look correct? They scan the diff, flag known patterns, catch security violations, and post inline comments before merge, which is useful, but only half the review. The other half is behavioral: does the code actually behave correctly once it’s running against your live system?

Enterprise applications don't fail quietly anymore. A single checkout flow might touch a dozen microservices, three databases, a message queue, and two external APIs before a customer sees a confirmation screen.

If you run LLM features in production, your most dangerous failures are the ones your monitoring never flags. Your LLM feature passed every test, and the demo went great. Three weeks after launch, a support ticket lands: the chatbot quoted a refund policy that does not exist. The dashboards are all green, and the same prompt answers correctly when you retry it. This is the blind spot LLM observability exists to close. Your existing tools saw the request come back fast with a clean status code.

Like it or not, vibe coding is here to stay. It’s too easy to just go away. Maybe if the per token cost rises too much at some point that it becomes cheaper to hire a junior… But until then, you’d better get used to it. For now, tools like Cursor, Copilot, and Claude let developers (and plenty of non-devs) ship full-stack apps faster than a junior is able to completely grasp the concept of the app they’re working on. And that’s pretty neat.

A year ago, I wrote “It’s the End of Observability (and I Feel Fine).” The upshot of that post was that AI was about to fundamentally change the way we approach systems design and operation in the future. In the grand tradition, I’d like to revisit my claims from then and see how my predictions panned out.