Observability is becoming a business language problem - and KubeCon's practitioners are rewriting the dictionary

Observability used to be the part of the technology stack that nobody wanted to pay for – tooling that sat quietly in the background until something broke, at which point an engineer would dig through logs and get everything back to zero.

That picture is no longer accurate. At a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) roundtable at KubeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, a panel of practitioners, open source maintainers, and vendor technologists made a compelling case that observability has evolved from a reactive troubleshooting function into a forward-looking business capability – and that the language the industry uses to describe it has not kept pace.

Keith Babo, Chief Product Officer at Solo.io – with over 25 years across Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and Solo.io – captured the scale of the change:

Observability plays a key role in probabilistic and non-deterministic workflows – explaining what's going on that we used to do with ...