I'm not going to judge how you do your job because I clearly don't know anything about the problems you're tasked to solve. However I will disagree that visibility is a web scale problem. I've still found having a centralised visibility platform useful even when managing a very small number of servers. After all, you need to set up monitoring and (presumably) alerts when something fails anyway. So it's just another service on your Nagios (for example) server.

Plus if you have any kind of auditing and compliance where you need to retain tamper proof logs for any period of time then you've already done the other half the work by streaming those logs off the servers.