I’ve had a version of the same conversation probably 30 times in the past year. A VP of engineering or a senior SRE describes their observability stack — the dashboards they’ve built, the alerting they’ve tuned, the Datadog or Grafana setup they’ve spent months getting right. And how their team still spent two to three hours figuring out what caused it before they could fix anything. The framing I hear most often goes something like this: “We can see everything. That gap between seeing and explaining is worth digging into, because it’s quietly become one of the more expensive problems in operations.