Observability should start with business outcomes, not infrastructure

The article argues that observability delivers real business value only when it is tied to customer journeys, business processes, and financial outcomes—not just infrastructure health. For CIOs, the strategic implication is that technical metrics like CPU, latency, and error rates must be translated into business severity so leaders can prioritize incidents, assess revenue at risk, and decide when to intervene. IT organizations should build a clear mapping from business outcomes to services and telemetry, and provide executives with a small set of decision-ready metrics rather than large technical dashboards.