What Makes a Production System Observable?

Logs, metrics, and traces are table stakes. Observability is whether they actually answer the question you have during an incident.

Draft — full write-up coming soon.

This piece will cover the difference between having monitoring and being observable — why leading indicators (queue depth, consumer lag, error-rate deltas) matter more than dashboards full of raw metrics, and how to design instrumentation around the questions you'll actually ask at 2am.