Ben Sigelman's journey in observability began at Google, where he developed the Dapper tool in 2005, which laid the groundwork for his later efforts in the field. His work at the startup Lightstep in 2015 led to the creation of OpenTracing, a project focused on distributed tracing. Recognizing the need for a standardized approach to collect monitoring data from cloud-native applications, OpenTracing eventually merged with OpenCensus, which included both tracing and metrics collection capabilities. In 2019, this merger resulted in OpenTelemetry, a unified open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which aims to provide a comprehensive solution for application observability by combining the strengths of both originating projects. OpenTelemetry has since become a prominent and future-proof tool for monitoring the complexities of modern software systems.