Observability tells teams what happened. Convergence helps them agree on what it means
Observability tells teams what happened. Convergence helps them agree on what it means.
Over the past several weeks, I've been speaking with SREs, Platform Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Engineering Managers, Major Incident Managers, and Incident Commanders.
One pattern keeps emerging.
Most organizations already have mature observability.
They collect:
- logs
- metrics
- traces
- dashboards
- alerts
Detection is rarely the difficult part.
The harder problem begins after the alert.
During complex production incidents, different teams often interpret the same system differently.
Infrastructure teams focus on infrastructure health.
Application teams focus on service behavior.
Networking teams focus on connectivity.
Every team has valid evidence.
None of them necessarily has the complete picture.
Several people described this as the period where multiple hypotheses exist simultaneously.
Everyone is investigating.
Nobody is yet coordinating.
The interesting part is what finally changes that.
Across many conversations, alignment usually happens once teams discover a shared artifact they all trust.
Sometimes that's:
- a deployment event
- a configuration change
- a distributed trace
- a dependency map
- or a reconstructed timeline showing cause and effect
Once that common reference appears, something changes.
The discussion shifts from debating competing explanations to refining a shared understanding.
Coordination speeds up.
Ownership becomes clearer.
Decision-making becomes easier.
This has gradually changed how I think about the problem.
I'm no longer convinced the biggest opportunity is collecting more operational data.
I'm beginning to think the larger challenge is helping teams converge on a trusted interpretation of that data faster.
I'm still validating this idea, so I'm curious:
Have you seen situations where teams had plenty of telemetry but still spent significant time agreeing on what the system was actually doing?
I'd love to hear whether this matches your experience or if you've seen a different pattern.
