What does ‘good’ telemetry look like?

Telemetry is essential for real-time application performance understanding, but defining "good" telemetry is complex and context-dependent, varying by system, team, and organization. Observability is not an action but a system's inherent quality, like security or reliability, and requires agreed-upon standard measurements for improvement. A new project, Instrumentation Score, aims to measure how well applications are set up for observability, with collaboration from industry leaders like New Relic and Splunk. The project emphasizes the importance of using multiple signals like traces, metrics, and logs to gain holistic system insights, supported by OpenTelemetry's vendor-neutral generation of these signals. Instrumentation Score evaluates telemetry quality at the point of use, considering how well it helps understand and improve systems, promoting observability maturity through prioritized actions and gamification.