In 2013, the push toward real-time systems was accelerating, but I learned the hard way that real-time metrics are not the same as real insight.
Early systems I worked on had great dashboards—yet missed real issues due to lack of:
- Historical baselines
- Intelligent alerting logic
- Properly tagged logs
Modern observability isn’t just metrics—it’s a trifecta of metrics, traces, and logs. That realization reshaped how I built alerting pipelines for mission-critical systems.