There Is Only One Key Difference Between Observability 1.0 and 2.0

charity wtf's about technology, databases, startups, engineering management, and whiskey.

As Agentic AI explodes in 2025, traditional observability faces new challenges. Can the three pillars of Metrics, Logs, and Traces handle agent workloads? This article explores how Agent Observability points toward Wide Events and Observability 2.0.

charity wtf's about technology, databases, startups, engineering management, and whiskey.

Joshua Wood’s personal website - software developer, photographer, and Honeybadger.io co-founder. Writing about software, entrepreneurship, and life in the Pacific Northwest.

I spent some time recently catching up on my #to-read saves in Obsidian. More than a few of these were blog posts from 2024 about software observability. Talk of "redefining observability", "observability 2.0", and "try Honeycomb" had caught my eye in a few spaces, and so I had been hoarding links on the topic. After spending a few days immersing myself in those articles and branching out to others, I decided to write this bullet-form roundup.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) means many things to many people. At its core, it enables developers to diagnose why their applications are slow and helps them provide a better experience to their users. Traditionally, this is accomplished by collecting a lot of data and displaying it in the form of dashboards and request traces. The problems you’re trying to solve are generally known up front.

Observability, so hot right now. Over the years, we’ve seen observability go from an unknown concept to a ubiquitous phrase that everyone is desperate to stamp...

My day started off with an innocent question, from an innocent soul. “Hey Charity, is profiling a pillar?” I hadn’t even had my coffee yet. “Someone was just telling me that profiling is the fourth…

Overview of the challenges of observability for LLMs, with comparisons to ML observability challenges.

The existing articles on Wide Events define the concept well but leave the implementation details to the reader.

charity wtf's about technology, databases, startups, engineering management, and whiskey.

The "three pillars" are a lie that keep good engineers trapped inside a mental model from the 1980s, paying outrageous sums of money for tooling that can't keep up with the complexity of modern systems.