The article challenges the traditional "three pillars" of observability (metrics, logs, traces), arguing that they are insufficient for modern, distributed architectures. Through three real-world incident examples at a large financial institution, the author demonstrates that application-level telemetry often fails to reveal actual customer impact. Instead of siloed data, the author advocates for "single threads"—clear, end-to-end distributed traces of individual customer requests—enriched with business context and measured by customer-facing Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/you-dont-need-three-pillars-you-need-single-threads