Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the past year alone, we’ve seen just how much a single outage can disrupt and how much stronger teams become when they learn from it. From the July 16, 2024 incident to the widespread June 2025 outage, it’s clear that incidents are inevitable. The question is: how do you transform each disruption into an opportunity to improve your processes for the next one?

June 12 started like any other Wednesday–until the internet broke. It started with Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) system, but the fallout hit everything built on top of it. Widespread service degradation swept across core Google products and third-party platforms. Gmail, Docs, Meet, and Chat went dark. Cloudflare services were unavailable. Developer and AI tools faltered.

As digital operations grow increasingly more complex, resilience is no longer optional, it’s essential. The next major outage isn’t a question of if, but when. And when it hits, the gap between true enterprise platforms and brittle point tools will become impossible to ignore.

In a time when budgets are tight but reliability still needs to be high, observability is under the spotlight. Monitoring and observability tools are some of the most expensive parts of a tech stack, often eating up the bulk of the budget. Luckily, there are strategies organizations can implement to reduce costs, such as utilizing open-source solutions like OpenTelemetry (OTEL), which provides a flexible, open standard for data collection without the price tag of proprietary tooling.