The best technical standard ever created came from one of the worst codebases in Unix history.

Syslog. Written by Eric Allman in the early 1980s as part of Sendmail. If you’ve ever been exposed to sendmail.cf and M4 configuration, that name should strike fear into your heart. But Allman got one thing exactly right: he made Syslog simple. So simple it became the de facto standard across Unix-like systems and network equipment for 45 years. RFC 3164 didn’t formalize it until nearly 2003. RFC 5424 wasn’t ratified until 2009.

A metric is not reality. It’s a lossy measurement with assumptions baked in.

I said it. I’ll own it. But when we talk about observability, what really is a metric?

Traditional infrastructure alerts page you when CPU hits 80%, but your users are fine. Meanwhile, degraded API performance goes unnoticed because no arbitrary threshold was crossed. An SLO (Service Level Objective) changes this - it’s a target reliability goal that measures what users actually experience, like “99.9% of requests succeed over 30 days.” Born from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, SLO-based alerting only pages when user experience is genuinely at risk, eliminating alert fatigue while catching real issues early.