Your dashboards
are lying to you.
Observatory is an observability tool for engineers willing to look at what their systems are actually doing. Not the flattened, billable, board-deck-ready version their vendor is willing to show them.
Three things we are
willing to say out loud.
- 01
Most dashboards lie.
Averages hide the long tail. Pre-aggregated metrics hide cardinality. The pretty chart is the cope. We are not interested in helping you cope. We are interested in helping you see.
- 02
Cardinality is not a billing event.
Every metric you cannot tag with a customer ID is a metric you cannot debug. We do not punish you with overage fees for asking specific questions. That is a vendor business model. It is not a tool.
- 03
If your on-call rotation is fine, you are not paying attention.
Production is always partially on fire. The teams that ship cleanly are the ones who refuse to look away from the parts that are. Observatory is for engineers who would rather know.
Some things we will
never ship.
- AI summaries that hallucinate the cause of your outage.
- Pricing pages that hide cardinality limits in a footnote.
- Dashboards designed to be screenshotted for a board deck.
- Roadmaps that have not been updated since the Series A.
- Logo walls full of companies that quietly migrated off a year ago.
If you wanted any of these, we are not the tool. There are companies who will sell them to you. Ask us and we will name a few.
Run it for a week.
See what your stack
has not been telling you.
Observatory is one binary, Apache 2.0, no telemetry, no account required. The bar is low. The discipline it asks of you is not. We think that's the right ratio.