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In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, Daniel Spoonhower, CTO of Lightstep, discussed and described what the “three pillars” concept means for DevOps, how monitoring is different, Lightstep’s evolution in developing observability solutions and a number of other related themes.

Spoonhower — whose experience in developing observability tools traces back to work as a software engineer at Google — makes it clear that a “three pillar” observability solution consisting of metrics, logs, and distributed tracing represents, in fact, separate capabilities.

“I think the thing that we’ve kind of seen is that thinking of those as three different tools that you can just kind of squish together is not really a great solution. I mean, the way that I think about observability is I like to get away from the what the specific tools are, and just say that observability is the thing that helps you connect the effects that you’re seeing — whether that’s performance or user experience, or whatever, connecting those effects back to the causes,” Spoonhower said. “And the thing that happened with deep systems is that it’s not like there are five or 10 potential causes to those problems, but there are thousands or tens of thousands of those things. And so you need a tool to help you find those.”