What it is (plain English)
Observability built for engineers running cloud-native, microservice applications: it collects traces, metrics, and logs so teams can see exactly where a request slowed down or failed across dozens of services. Aimed at SRE/DevOps troubleshooting, not just infrastructure monitoring.
Problems it solves
- "The app is slow" with no way to pinpoint which of many services is the cause.
- Engineers stitching together logs from a dozen systems by hand.
- No shared performance picture between dev, ops, and SRE.
What must exist first
Platform Core Setup. Instrumentation of your applications (typically OpenTelemetry) is the real prerequisite — this is engineering work in your codebase.
What the customer needs to provide
- Applications instrumented to emit telemetry (OpenTelemetry or supported SDKs).
- Your service architecture and what "good performance" looks like per service.
- Engineering team engagement — this is a developer-facing tool.
Where it can go next
Performance signals can feed Event Management and raise Incident Management tickets; SLO tracking supports reliability programs; ties infrastructure (ITOM) and application layers together.