Observability: The Real Killer App
Commvault, Thursday, November 20th, 2025
My friends, I've been around long enough in the world of DevOps, cybersecurity and cloud-native to see the 'next big thing' fade into 'just another dashboard.' But today I'm here to tell you: observability isn't just another tool-it might very well be the killer app of our era.
Remember when 'monitoring' meant metrics and logs siloed in Excel-spreadsheets or vendor dashboards? We worried about a thousand things: CPU spikes, missing logs, latency creeping up. Then came APM (application performance monitoring) which promised to tie everything together. But APM had limits-focused often on the application layer, but weak at systems scale, tracing across microservices, and dealing with the explosion of telemetry from cloud-native and containerized environments.
Now fast forward: we're seeing sweeping moves in the marketplace that tell me one thing-observability has entered maturity, and not just as a tool, but as a market-creating platform. Case in point: Palo Alto Networks' announced acquisition of Chronosphere for $3.35 billion. That's right-observability startup at >$160 m ARR being bought for over 20 times revenue. The message is loud: the architecture of visibility is now mission-critical.