Observability 2.0 and the Database for It

Summary

Observability 2.0 is a concept introduced by Charity Majors of Honeycomb, though she later expressed reservations about labeling it as such(follow-up).Despite its contested naming, Observability 2.0 represents an evolution from the foundational "three pillars" of observability, metrics, logs, and traces, which have dominated the field for nearly a decade. Instead, it emphasizes a single source of truth paradigm as a data foundation of observability. This approach prioritizes high-cardinality, wide-event datasets over traditional siloed telemetry, aiming to address modern system complexity more effectively.What is Observability 2.0 and Wide Events For years, observability has relied on the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces. These pillars spawned countless libraries, tools, and standards—including OpenTelemetry, one of the most successful cloud-native projects, which is built entirely on this paradigm. However, as systems grow in complexity, the limitations of this approach become evident.The Downsides of Traditional Observability Data silos: Metrics, logs, and traces are often stored separately, leading to uncorrelated, or even inconsistent, data without meticulous management.Pre-aggregation trade-offs: Pre-aggregated metrics (counters, summaries, histograms) were originally designed to reduce storage costs and improve performance by sacrificing granularity. However, the rigid structure of time-series data limits the depth of contextual information, forcing teams to generate millions of distinct time-series to capture necessary details. Ironically, this practice now incurs exponentially higher storage and computational costs—directly contradicting the approach’s original purpose.Unstructured logs: While logs inherently contain structured data, extracting meaning requires intensive parsing, indexing, and computational effort.Static instrumentation: Tools rely on predefined queries and thresholds, limiting detection to 'known knowns'. Adapting observability re...