Breaking the Pillars: Rethinking Observability with Charity Majors
From Big Ideas in App Architecture by Cockroach Labs
March 18, 2026 · 50 min
About this episode
Charity Majors discusses the limitations of traditional observability models and proposes a new approach for modern engineering teams.
Most observability platforms are built around siloed signals, metrics, logs, and traces; not the rich context engineers actually need. The architecture of observability tooling hasn’t kept pace with the architecture of today’s distributed systems. In this episode, David sits down with Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io and co-author of Observability Engineering, to rethink how modern teams understand production systems. Charity argues that the “three pillars” model is outdated, making the case for wide, structured events that preserve context and embrace high-cardinality data so engineers can ask better questions in real time. Drawing on lessons from operating Parse and its challenging acquisition by Facebook, Charity explains how those experiences shaped Honeycomb’s fast, custom-built observability engine. The two also explore how AI agents could soon close the loop between code changes and production validation, and Charity previews the upcoming second edition of Observability Engineering, including a new focus on observability governance for CTOs. Links for Charity: charitydotwtf.substack.com , honeycomb.io/blog , x.com/mipsytipsy
People in this episode
Host: David
Guest: Charity Majors
Topics covered
- observability
- distributed systems
- engineering
- data analysis
- AI in production
- software architecture
Keywords
- observability
- three pillars
- high-cardinality data
- production systems
- AI agents
- observability governance
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Honeycomb.io, Facebook
Books & works: Observability Engineering
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