You Don't Need Three Pillars, You Need Single Threads

Traditional observability models, which rely on the "three pillars" of metrics, logs, and traces, are facing challenges in modern service-based architectures, as demonstrated by recent incidents at a large financial institution. These incidents highlighted the limitations of traditional telemetry in assessing customer impact and diagnosing complex interactions between services. The use of OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb has provided more effective solutions, enabling the creation of customer-centric Service Level Objectives (SLOs) that offer a comprehensive view of the customer experience. By tracing single customer requests across services and aligning telemetry data with customer intent, organizations can better diagnose issues and improve customer satisfaction. However, it's crucial to avoid using SLOs to assign blame and instead focus on collaborative efforts between software, product, and business teams to enhance performance and reliability. Contextualizing data through end-to-end traces and involving stakeholders in defining acceptable performance levels are key steps in developing meaningful SLOs that drive continuous improvement.