What you're describing is very real and it works to a degree. I've seen this same manual maintenance play out over and over for 10 years: cleaning dashboards, chasing engineers to align on schemas, running cost exercises. It never gets better, only worse.

It's nuts to me that after a decade of "innovation," observability still feels like a tax on engineers. Still a huge distraction. Still requires all this tedious maintenance. And I genuinely think it's rooted in vendor misalignment. The whole industry is incentivized to create more, not give you signal with less.

The post focuses on waste, but the other side of the coin is quality. Removing waste is part of that, but so is aligning on schemas, adhering to standards, catching mistakes before they ship. When data quality is high and stays high automatically, everything you're describing goes away.

That's the real goal.