I often think about the difference between motion and direction. A person can be running very fast, but if they are running blind, are they really moving forward?
Automation without observability feels the same. You can put a system on autopilot, but without sensors, it’s just motion — activity mistaken for progress.
In boardrooms and tech roadmaps, automation often takes centre stage. It carries the promise of efficiency, savings, and modernity. Leaders want to hear about how much faster things will get or how many headcount hours will be saved. But in my experience, the projects that truly shifted the game weren’t about automation first. They were about learning to see.
The shift from guessing to knowing
When something breaks in a system, the default human reaction is to guess. Is it the app? The network? The database? Teams go down rabbit holes, often in parallel, often in conflict. Hours are lost, customers are frustrated, and trust erodes.
Then one day, you turn on a dashboard with real-time telemetry. Suddenly, there is no guessing. You can see the faulty service, the precise point of strain, the ripple effect across systems. MTTR drops, but more than that — the mood changes. Anxiety is replaced with calm precision.
That is the first gift of observability: it replaces speculation with sight.
Seeing ahead, not just behind
But observability is not just about diagnosing the past. Done well, it begins to whisper about the future. Patterns in data become early warnings. A rising latency curve, an unusual error rate, a system breathing heavier than usual — all signals that trouble is near.
Predictive alerts are not glamorous, but they are transformative. They stop crises before they touch the customer. They prevent that dreaded moment when your brand is being called out on Twitter before your ops team even knows something is wrong.
I once saw this reduce customer-visible incidents by nearly half for a SaaS company. The difference was not only in uptime but in the quiet confidence of the team. They were no longer waiting for alarms to ring; they were already responding before the noise began.
Translating tech into business
Perhaps the most overlooked dimension of observability is how it bridges language.
Executives do not speak in logs, traces, or metrics. They speak in revenue, churn, cost, and margin. Observability allows us to make that translation. To say, “Reducing MTTR by 30% saved $5M in retained revenue,” is a different conversation than saying, “We fixed incidents faster.”
This shift is profound. It turns operations from being perceived as a cost centre into a growth enabler. Automation, in this context, is no longer a tactical IT project — it becomes a strategic lever for EBITDA.
Why sequence matters
The temptation, of course, is to jump straight into automation. It feels tangible. You can show a script closing a ticket or a bot resolving a routine request. But without observability, these wins are shallow. They don’t scale. They don’t tell a story leadership can believe in.
I’ve come to see the right order as a kind of discipline:
- First, build observability. Create clarity.
- Then, layer in automation. Automate only what you can see clearly.
- Finally, map outcomes to business metrics. Show not just what changed, but what it meant.
This order builds credibility. It anchors every action in evidence. And it ensures that automation isn’t just faster — it is wiser.
A closing thought
When I think about automation and observability, I think back to the metaphor of flying. Automation is autopilot — it is invaluable, powerful, and necessary in the modern age. But observability is the radar, the instruments, the sensors. Without them, autopilot is just surrender to fate.
So if you are a leader weighing investments, pause before you chase automation ROI. Ask instead: What do we actually see today? What are we blind to?
And then go one step deeper: What’s the #1 business metric our ops team is measured on?
Tie that to observability. That’s where the journey begins. Automation will follow — not as a leap of faith, but as a natural consequence of seeing clearly.
Because in the end, clarity is the true missing link.
C
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