Observability has emerged as a way for enterprises to better understand sprawling infrastructure and application environments. According to Gartner, “Observability enables organizations to reduce the time it takes to identify the root cause of performance-impacting problems. In particular, and in contrast to traditional monitoring, operators can freely interrogate data post-hoc without the need to pre-program dashboards.”

This sounds promising, and the market responded quickly, but predictably. Large and monolithic monitoring platforms embraced the term and added new features, making them even larger and more monolithic. These monolithic platforms represent a failed choice-based strategy. They assume that all observability data is collected, centralized, integrated, and only analyzed by a single tool. Enterprises following a choice-based observability strategy find themselves locked into multi-year investments without the flexibility to react to evolving technologies.