Software observability is a critical concept for understanding and improving the performance of modern distributed systems, particularly as more software moves to the cloud and adopts microservices architectures. Unlike traditional monitoring, which focuses on individual events or metrics, observability allows developers and IT professionals to infer a system's internal states from its external outputs using telemetry data, thereby offering deeper insights into system behavior. This has led to the development of standards like OpenTracing and OpenCensus, which have now merged into OpenTelemetry under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, aiming to provide a unified framework for capturing metrics and traces with support for various analytics tools and pluggable backends. However, the merger creates some uncertainty as the ecosystem continues to evolve, but the need for enhanced visibility in cloud-native environments remains essential. Observability not only enhances software reliability and quality but also minimizes downtime, making it a crucial component of modern software development and operations.