The Broken Promise of Observability

Observability was supposed to empower engineering teams. It was supposed to be a tool engineers could use to become more efficient and effective. Instead, it's become a bloated, expensive, chaotic mess.

At the heart of the problem? Garbage telemetry.

• Useless logs, metrics, and traces flooding our systems.
• Vendors pushing us to store everything—because that's how they make money.
• Engineering teams drowning in noise while paying a fortune for the privilege.

Observability today is broken by design. It's time we change that.

The Great Lie of Observability

Vendors have sold us a lie: that more data equals better observability. That if we just throw enough telemetry into their black-box platform, the answers will magically appear.

Any engineer who has ever sifted through bloated logs of telemetry knows this is simply not true.

More data is not the answer. Better data is.

But instead of fixing the data, we've spent years trying to manage the mess:

• Pipelines move it.
• Cheaper storage hoards it.
• Better standards organize it.

But none of these solve the real problem: Telemetry Quality.

They Want You Blind

The dirty secret of observability? Vendors know your data is full of waste—they want you blind to this fact.

They thrive on opacity. They refuse to show you how much of your telemetry is waste (often 40% or more). They design billing schemes that keep you locked in. They let your telemetry balloon out of control and tell you the only solution is to keep paying more.

As Klarna's Director of Engineering put it:

"The most frustrating part of watching your money burn is knowing your supplier could help—if they only cared about your long-term success."

They don't.

Refusing to provide transparency on waste is not an accident. It's the model.

Vendors don't charge you for insight—they charge you for data. Every useless log, high-cardinality metric, and redundant trace is profitable for them.

They should fix this.
But they won't—because it's too profitable to keep you blind.

That's why telemetry quality has never been solved—until now.

Telemetry Quality: The Missing Layer

Observability has been missing something fundamental: Telemetry Quality.

We've spent years optimizing how we store, move, and process telemetry. But we've never fixed the actual data.

That's why observability is broken. Not because vendors are too expensive. But because of poor telemetry quality.

Telemetry Quality is the missing layer.

• It's not cost optimization. Cutting data blindly makes observability worse.
• It's not a pipeline. Moving garbage efficiently is still moving garbage.
• It's not a cheaper alternative. Bad data follows you no matter where you go.

Telemetry Quality is about fixing the data at the root.

• Filtering out garbage before it leaves your host, before your pipeline, before your vendor.
• Surgically removing waste and noise without removing valuable data.
• Giving you confidence in your data—finally.

This isn't about cutting costs. It's about maximizing the value of every byte of telemetry.

When you know that every log, metric, and trace is signal, not waste, you can stop second-guessing what to turn off.

This is data you can trust—data that justifies its own cost.

Aligned Incentives, Aligned Observability

"Show me the incentives, and I will show you the outcome." – Charlie Munger

Vendors will never fix telemetry quality—because they have no incentive to.

Their business depends on more data. Telemetry Quality depends on better data.

When incentives are aligned, observability works:

• Costs drop without losing visibility.
• Engineers stop sifting through junk and find what they need faster.
• Dashboards and alerts stop breaking because the data is clean.
• You can justify observability costs with confidence.
• Your entire organization sees telemetry health and how they impact observability.
• Teams improve telemetry quality on their own—without leadership mandates.

The Future of Observability Starts Here

Telemetry Quality isn't a feature. It's a category.

In five years, every serious engineering team will have a Telemetry Quality layer.

The only question is: will you be ahead of the curve, or playing catch-up?

The time for bloated, wasteful observability is over. It's time to take control.

Join us.

Tero. Telemetry Quality, Finally.