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Re:Observability's Past, Present, and Future by shcallaway on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:32PM (#46508439)
You're not the first person I've met that has articulated an idea like this. It sounds amazing. Do you have an idea about why this approach isn't broadly popular?
Re:Observability's Past, Present, and Future by donavanm on Monday January 05, 2026 @10:57PM (#46508568)
cost and compliance are non-trivial for non-trivial applications. Universal instrumentation and recording creates a meaningful fixed cost for every transaction, and you must record ~every transaction; you can't sample & retain post-hoc. If you're processing many thousands of TPS on many thousands of nodes that quickly adds up to a very significant aggregate cost even if the individual cost is small.

For compliance (or contractual agreement) there are limitations on data collection, retention, transfer, and access. I certainly don't want private keys, credentials, or payment instruments inadvertently retained. I dont want confidential material to be distributed out of band or in an uncontrolled manner (like your dev laptop). I probably don't even want employees to be able to _see_ "customer data." Which runs head long in to a bunch challenges where low level trace/sampling/profiling tools have more less open access to record and retain arbitrary bytes.

Edit: Im a big fan of continuous and pervasive observability and tracing data. Enable and retain that at ~debug level and filter + join post-hoc as needed. My skepticism above is about continuous profiling and recording (ala vtune/perf/ebpf), which is where "you" need to be cognizant of risks & costs.