In my sordid career, I’ve worked as an actor, bug exterminator, wild-animal remover, electrician, carpenter, stage-combat instructor, ASL interpreter, and Sunday school teacher. I also work with computers sometimes. While my first digital experience was an Atari 400, my technical career started in 1989 (when Windows came free on twelve 5¼” with a copy of Excel 1.0). I got involved with monitoring 27 years ago. Since then I’ve worked with a wide range of tools: Tivoli, BMC, OpenView, janky perl scripts (another way of saying “Tivoli”), Nagios, SolarWinds, Grafana, New Relic, and other assorted nightmare fuel. In that time, I’ve learned a lot about monitoring and observability in all it’s many, splendid, and horrifying forms.