A client was confident about how their services talked to each other. Then we instrumented the system with OpenTelemetry and found out what was actually happening.
A payment provider started responding in 8 seconds instead of 200ms. It wasn't an outage — their status page stayed green. But it took out our client's entire checkout flow because nobody had configured a timeout.
A client had six monitoring tools and still couldn't diagnose a production incident in under an hour. The problem wasn't the tools — it was what happens when observability grows by accretion instead of design.
A startup founder built their MVP almost entirely with AI coding agents. It worked. Then they hired a team, and within two months nobody could ship anything. I got called in to figure out why.
A client's PostgreSQL writes were getting slower every quarter. The table had 57 indexes. Only 14 of them were ever used. Every INSERT and UPDATE was paying a tax nobody had thought to audit.