In a conversation featuring Liz Fong-Jones from Honeycomb, the discussion explores the crucial concepts of error budgets and service level objectives (SLOs) in the realm of site reliability engineering (SRE) and DevOps. Fong-Jones, with significant experience in reliability engineering, emphasizes the integration of DevOps principles into SRE practices, highlighting the evolution towards platform engineering. She articulates the importance of balancing reliability with innovation, advocating for a pragmatic approach to system reliability that avoids over-investment in uptime beyond practical user needs. The conversation also delves into the significance of observability, particularly distributed tracing, as a means to diagnose complex system interactions efficiently. Fong-Jones discusses the role of open telemetry as a unified approach to tracing, enabling better flexibility across different vendor solutions. This dialogue underscores the importance of meaningful measurement and the cultural aspects of engineering practices that foster continuous improvement and effective incident management.