The basic idea is that when one failure fans out across 20 services, you often end up with 20 alerts and 20 separate investigations, even though there is really just one root cause. I’m using distributed tracing to build a live model of how errors propagate through the system, and then exposing that context directly at each affected service.

Longer term, I want this to become a very high-precision RCA engine. Right now I’m looking to try it with a few early design partners that already have a lot of tracing data, especially OpenTelemetry or Datadog APM users. I'll love to chat with some folks who would be willing to try it out!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/observability-broken-its-time...

Points: 6

# Comments: 5

We’re drowning in telemetry but starving for insight. The industry incentives are misaligned: they reward ingestion and storage, not intelligence.

I recently started an open, collective movement called omji.ai to explore a fundamental shift: measuring insight per dollar of telemetry stored. We need to push vendors and internal teams toward intelligence, not ingestion.

I’m curious to hear from folks facing the pain - how do we fix this? We need practical, non-obvious ideas.

1. What technical or economic levers would actually shift the industry's focus from volume to intelligence?

2. Has anyone in a large organization tried benchmarking observability systems based on insight (e.g., MTTR impact) vs. telemetry cost?

3. How could open collaboration (tools, standards, benchmarks) make this practical for every engineering team?

Full background post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/observability-broken-lets-cha...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45543608

Points: 2

# Comments: 1