The concept of observability was introduced a little over 60 years ago as a notion related to control theory, systems theory, and signal processing. Today, modern observability is still very much focused on looking at systems’ outputs to determine their internal states. Sprinkle in site reliability engineering, and there should be little to no performance issues in distributed systems, right? In an ideal world, yes, but in reality, there is still work to be done.
And this is where we could use your insights!