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Observability you can act on, whether you build it or lead it, plus the few signals worth your time.
This week's Signal Drop is the argument I kept losing and finally worked out how to win: why working on observability is the hardest thing to fund, and what to do before the renewal lands.
A quiet quarter is the worst sales pitch your monitoring will ever make. |
This week's Signal Drop
Quiet Isn't Good: How to Justify Observability Spend. The better your monitoring works, the less anyone can see why it costs anything. That is the prevention paradox, and it is a measurement problem, not a value problem. The fix is not better tooling. It is putting an honest number on the invisible side of the scale, while it is quiet, before anyone is under pressure.
METRICS & MAYHEM
Quiet Isn't Good: How to Justify Observability Spend
Prefer to watch? It is on YouTube.
What you'll take away:
Why a quiet quarter is the worst sales pitch your monitoring will ever make.
The prevention paradox, and why being good at your job hides your value.
The one-slide habit that makes a near-miss visible before the renewal.
How to explain observability in the language the business actually cares about.
How to decouple your instrumentation from your vendor without a two-year migration.
Latest on the blog
byte-size: What Is Agent Observability? When an agent acts, ordinary monitoring goes quiet on the one question that matters: why did it do that. Read it.
There Is No Agreed Pattern For Running AI Agents Yet. Before a real pattern exists, a vendor best practice is just their product with a halo on it. Read it.
What you missed last week
The recent posts, a couple of signals, and what was worth the time.
On the blog: byte-size: What Is a Business Event? (the journey the dashboard never shows) and byte-size: What Is an AI Agent? (the plain-English front door to the agent series).
Worth a listen, for the practitioners: Code RED (Dash0) with Judd Naus of Prepper on observability pipelines: compress the telemetry in the stream, keep the signal, and why whoever owns the data wins as the LLM wrappers commoditise. Listen.
The AI Daily Brief on Uber's "agentic pods": pair an AI-fluent engineer with a business expert for two weeks and ship an agent, so the workflow, not the task, becomes the unit of automation. Listen.
And one to stretch: Martin Moore on running one-on-ones (his No Bullsh!t Leadership show): close every one with three questions, do you understand it, is it reasonable, and what might stop you, to turn a friendly chat into real clarity. Listen.
Worth a read, from the week's news: Cisco is acquiring Galileo, on the bet that agent observability cannot run at human speed. Read it.
Cribl buys CardinalOps and edges into SecOps: observability and security-monitoring data are consolidating, so watch where your telemetry ends up. Read it.
SecurityBrief AU: developers are losing half their day and most leaders cannot see it, because platform engineering without observability builds pipelines nobody can actually run. Read it.
That is the week. Next time, what a quiet quarter actually costs when you finally put a price on it.
Allan
PS: If you take one thing from this, make the invisible visible while it is quiet. That is the whole game.
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