Observability, initially promising clarity, has left us overwhelmed with data devoid of meaningful insights.

The increasing complexity, adaptability, and criticality of distributed computing have rendered mere logs, traces, and metrics insufficient for reliable monitoring. While these tools serve some diagnostic purpose, they’ve transformed into sources of noise rather than signals. We must acknowledge that our systems aren’t merely mechanical devices amenable to observation, but dynamic, adaptive, and semiotic networks that demand comprehension, not merely monitoring. We must embrace this evolution and adopt a more comprehensive approach to system management.

We’ve constructed digital observatories dedicated to observing the celestial bodies within our systems, meticulously cataloging every transient light and movement. However, as astronomers without a comprehensive understanding of cosmology, we collect data points without a coherent framework for comprehending the universe.

Our dashboards have evolved into contemporary star charts, albeit visually appealing, lacking any profound significance. Our monitoring tools generate maps of territories that undergo continuous reshaping. Analogous to cartographers venturing into uncharted seas, we meticulously document coastlines that fluctuate with each tide.

By the time we’ve charted the landscape, it’s already transformed. We’ve metamorphosed into archaeologists of our systems, meticulously excavating layers of telemetry to reconstruct the past, invariably arriving after the catastrophe.

The fundamental challenge lies not with our tools, though at times it can feel that way, but rather with the territory they seek to map, which has undergone significant evolution beyond their recognition. Modern distributed systems have transformed into entities that defy the comprehension of our conventional observability frameworks.

Emergent Emergencies

Analogous to ant colonies that construct intricate structures without any individual ant possessing the blueprint, modern systems now exhibit behaviors that originate from numerous interactions rather than explicit design.

When thousands of microservices engage in communication, they generate patterns and behaviors that defy the expectations of engineers and teams. For instance, a payment processing system may unexpectedly prioritize certain transactions during high workloads—not because it was programmed to do so, but because the interplay between rate-limiting, cache warming, and load balancing algorithms inadvertently created a preference.

Traditional observability, while capable of identifying symptoms, remains oblivious to these emergent phenomena.

This emergence often blurs into an emergency when system behaviors cross critical thresholds. Similar to how changing temperatures transform water from liquid to gas, seemingly minor shifts in traffic patterns or resource utilization can trigger phase transitions in system behavior. A cascade of retries in one subsystem might precipitate resource exhaustion in another, transforming a localized issue into a system-wide crisis. What makes these scenarios particularly challenging is their resistance to reductionist analysis—the emergency can’t be understood by examining individual components in isolation, just as a traffic jam can’t be understood by studying a single vehicle.

Instead, we require observability approaches that can detect precursor patterns to these phase transitions, identifying the signatures of emergent behaviors before they evolve into emergencies. This requires not just monitoring tools but interpretive frameworks that can recognize the higher-order patterns that signal a system transitioning from normal emergence to critical instability—much like meteorologists identify hurricane formation not from individual rain clouds, but from specific atmospheric patterns that emerge from their collective behavior.

Dynamic Topologies

Yesterday’s architectural diagrams are obsolete in today’s dynamic systems.

Container orchestration, serverless computing, and auto-scaling have enabled continuous system reshaping. The infrastructure supporting a customer’s checkout flow at 9:00 AM may be entirely different by 9:05 AM. We no longer observe static machinery but dynamic, adaptable systems.

While logging systems meticulously record the past, that past exists in a topology that has since changed. This is akin to diagnosing traffic patterns by analyzing photographs of roads that have undergone reconstruction.

What matters now are the emergent behaviors arising from these ever-shifting components—how they interact, adapt, and evolve collectively. Like studying ecosystems rather than individual organisms, we must observe patterns of resource consumption, load distribution, and failure propagation across the system.

The dynamics of auto-scaling responses to traffic surges, service mesh rerouting during partial outages, and data flow adaptations reveal more about system health than static snapshots ever could. These higher-order observations capture the system’s resilience, its capacity to maintain equilibrium under stress, and its ability to self-heal—properties that transcend the individual containers or functions that implement them at any given moment.

Our observability tools must evolve to capture these dynamic relationships and feedback loops that define modern systems, rather than fixating on the transient infrastructure that temporarily hosts them.

Human-in-the-Loop Systems

Today’s systems not only communicate with one another but also engage in intricate feedback loops with humans.

User behavior influences system behavior, which, in turn, impacts user behavior. For instance, when an e-commerce site encounters slowdowns, users modify their navigation patterns. This altered traffic generates new hotspots and bottlenecks, consequently altering system behavior. This dynamic human-computer interaction results in a non-deterministic system that conventional observability struggles to comprehend, let alone forecast. Instead of observability, our goal should be situational intelligence:

We’ve positioned ourselves as puppeteers, manipulating strings to orchestrate our systems. However, the complexity has surpassed our comprehension, leaving us in control of marionettes whose marionettes are in turn controlled by others. We must cease to believe that we can exert complete control over every movement and instead design systems that comprehend their choreography.

When a critical service malfunctions, we hastily intervene by scaling resources, restarting containers, and throttling traffic. Nevertheless, these interventions frequently trigger cascading effects that we hadn’t anticipated.

The database we scaled up now exerts strain on the connection pool. The containers we restarted overwhelmed the service discovery system with registration requests. The traffic we throttled generated retry storms elsewhere.

Situational intelligence acknowledges this complexity. Instead of attempting to manually orchestrate every component, it empowers systems to comprehend their contexts and relationships. It transforms our role from anxious puppeteers to systems choreographers who establish the principles and boundaries within which our digital ecosystems can adapt and recover.

The Ecological Approach to Systems

Situational intelligence transforms our mindset from mechanical to ecological.

Instead of fixing machines, we cultivate ecosystems. When a garden fails to thrive, the solution lies not in meticulous observations of individual leaves but in comprehending the interplay of soil, water, sunlight, and seasons.

The gardener doesn’t control the growth of each cell in each plant; rather, they create conditions conducive to flourishing—proper soil composition, adequate drainage, and appropriate spacing. Recognizing patterns—which plants coexist harmoniously, which compete for resources, and how the garden evolves through seasons—is crucial.

Similarly, with situational intelligence, we prioritize establishing environments that foster system adaptation and resilience rather than solely focusing on controlling individual components. We identify conditions conducive to system health and patterns indicative of potential issues. Instead of attempting to predict every conceivable failure mode, we construct systems capable of responding intelligently to changing conditions.

Our current approach to observability is like the parable of blind men describing an elephant—one feels the trunk, another the tusk, another the tail. Each perspective is accurate but incomplete.

Situational intelligence synthesizes these perspectives coherently, revealing the elephant in all its complexity.

In modern systems, the database team sees high query latency, the API team sees increased error rates, the infrastructure team sees normal resource utilization, and the frontend team sees degraded user experience.

Each perspective is valid but partial. Traditional observability gives each team tools to observe their part of the elephant, but fails to integrate these perspectives into a cohesive understanding. Situational intelligence bridges these isolated views. It doesn’t just collect data from each domain but establishes their relationships. It recognizes that a slight increase in database lock contention, combined with a specific traffic pattern and a recent code deployment, collectively explains the degraded user experience, even when no single metric has crossed a critical threshold.

The shift from observability to situational intelligence doesn’t exist in isolation—it’s part of larger transformations reshaping our technological landscape. Organizations worldwide are investing billions in digital transformation initiatives, yet the vast majority of these efforts fail. The reason is simple: we’ve focused on digitizing without accounting for the exponential increase in complexity that digitization brings.

Companies replace paper processes with digital ones, only to discover they’ve created systems too complex to comprehend or manage effectively. Situational intelligence offers a way forward.

Rather than adding more digital complexity without the means to understand it, situational intelligence provides the cognitive framework necessary to navigate digital transformation successfully. It enables organizations to see not just the status of individual digital initiatives and how they interact to create business outcomes or risks.

A retail chain that’s digitized its supply chain, customer experience, and inventory management needs more than separate dashboards for each system. It needs situational intelligence that reveals how a weather event affecting suppliers creates inventory shortages that should trigger customer communication and pricing adjustments—all as an integrated understanding rather than siloed alerts.

Engineering Intelligence

Traditional reliability engineering emphasizes the prevention of failures. In contrast, modern resilience engineering recognizes the inevitability of failures and focuses on constructing systems that swiftly recover and draw upon incident experiences for improvement. Situational intelligence serves as the crucial missing link in resilience engineering, providing the contextual awareness systems necessary for intelligent adaptation to failures.

Unlike systems that operate in binary states of “working” or “failed,” situational intelligence empowers systems to comprehend their capabilities and limitations in current conditions, enabling them to adjust accordingly.

For instance, a payment processing system equipped with situational intelligence not only identifies a degraded third-party dependency but also comprehends the business implications. It automatically routes transactions through alternative pathways, communicates with affected systems regarding anticipated latency increases, and safeguards critical functionality while gracefully degrading non-essential features.

The future belongs to systems capable of operating with progressively increasing levels of autonomy.

From self-healing infrastructure to algorithmic business decisions, we’re constructing systems that must make intelligent choices without human intervention. These autonomous systems require more than mere rules and thresholds; they necessitate situational intelligence.

For instance, a self-driving car doesn’t merely observe objects; it constructs a continuously updated model of its environment, comprehending the intentions and relationships of surrounding vehicles, pedestrians, and obstacles. It comprehends the situation to make decisions that harmonize safety, efficiency, and passenger comfort.

Our digital systems likewise merit the same level of contextual understanding. Infrastructure capable of true self-healing requires not only predefined recovery procedures but also the ability to comprehend the current situation, simulate potential recovery paths, and select the most appropriate action based on business priorities and technical limitations.

The Church of Doom

It’s imperative to recognize that our emphasis on observability has become a convenient justification for inaction.

We’ve constructed elaborate data collection systems while our systems deteriorate. We don’t require more sophisticated methods to monitor the situation; we need systems that prevent the fire before the initial spark.

Our current approaches are fundamentally flawed—we’re attempting to resolve tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s thinking. The complexity curve has surpassed our capabilities. Incorporating additional dashboards, enhancing logging, or increasing granular tracing is akin to introducing more sophisticated thermometers to measure the fever while disregarding the infection.

Situational intelligence shifts our mindset from passive observation to proactive comprehension, from reacting retrospectively to predicting and shaping future states. It’s time we cease accepting noisy dashboards and commence demanding intelligence-driven decisions.

Let’s abandon the current definition of observability and construct the future of situational intelligence. Not as a gradual improvement, but as the fundamental paradigm shift necessary to manage the systems we’ve developed.