front matter
I came to software telemetry the way most of us do: as a producer through the use of print statements in my code and as a consumer by reading the logs and metrics produced by the code I was using. In spite of my computer science degree, I did not go into software engineering right out of college. No, I went into what was then called IT or operations, and I stayed there until I had clocked 14 years of experience. That brought me to 2011, which was a new era in a lot of ways.
That year, I left my job in higher education to join a 20-person legal technology startup as its only operations person. That year also was in the middle of a revolution in software telemetry, when the monitoring systems long used by operations teams and systems administrators started to be extended for use directly by software. The metrics style of telemetry was born. Over the next decade, we saw two more styles of telemetry emerge as databases became featured enough to support them: observability (which did not last long on its own) and distributed tracing.