Monitoring tells you something is broken. Observability helps you explain why it’s broken — fast enough to reduce incident impact and avoid wasting money on noisy telemetry.

In this episode, Matt and Helen break down monitoring vs observability in practical terms, then go deep on the three pillars (logs, metrics, traces) and how they work together during real incidents. We also cover the part most teams ignore until finance gets involved: log ingestion cost, what to keep, what to drop, and how to keep signal high without the bill exploding.