The last two years in software development and operations have been characterized by the emerging idea of “observability”. The need for a novel concept guiding the efforts to control our systems arose from the accelerating paradigm changes driven by the need to scale and cloud native technologies. In contrast, the monitoring landscape stagnated and failed to meet the new challenges our massively more complex applications pose. Therefore, observability evolved as a mission-critical property of modern systems and still attracts much attention. The numerous debates differentiated monitoring from observability and covered its technical and cultural impact on building and operating systems. At the beginning of 2019, the community reached consensus on the characteristic of observability and elaborated its core principles. Consequently, new tools and SaaS applications appeared marking the beginning of its commercialization. This post identifies the forces driving the evolution of observability, points out trends we presently perceive and tries to predict future developments.