At Honeycomb, we often hear from teams who know they need to build a culture of observability, but are intimidated by all of the work — especially instrumentation code — they’ll need to get there. This talk covers our product engineering team’s own incremental journey moving from metrics to events to traces, and discusses some valuable things we learned using our instrumentation at each phase of the process. The primary focus is on the technical implementation details of each phase of instrumentation and the benefits of each move, but we’ll also cover how to hack your existing tools to support you in each step of the process, and talk about when it makes sense to fit instrumentation work into your roadmap.