Subject

Observability

Everything we have written on this subject, newest first.

Database Observability vs Monitoring

March 19, 2026

Your database monitoring dashboard says everything is green. Your users are reporting errors. Both things are true at the same time, and the gap between them is where incidents live.

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Incident Investigation

March 1, 2026

A sample incident investigation report, as produced by Sixta — the evidence, the root cause and the recommended fix, set out as an engineer would hand them over.

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Why do we still trust metrics that lie to us?

August 13, 2025

Teams celebrate 99% cache hit ratios while their databases burn. The metric looks perfect, but the queries are reading 50x more data than needed. A problem first described in 2004 that we still haven't solved.

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Observability and the Art of Managing Our Ignorance

April 23, 2025

We can't monitor what we don't know to look for. A long-form piece on why observability needs to move beyond dashboards toward systems that surface what you didn't think to ask.

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The gap between troubleshooting data and strategic intelligence

March 18, 2025

As database estates grow more complex, teams cobble together CloudWatch, observability tools, and CUR data — generating data without increasing visibility. Why the next layer of database intelligence needs to work differently.

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