Observability should feel invisible - but never be absent. Yet for many teams, it's a constant source of friction: developers reinvent telemetry pipelines, traces break across services, and platform engineers scramble to maintain consistency.

This talk introduces a better approach: platform-led observability. By embracing open standards like OpenTelemetry and treating observability as a built-in feature, platform engineers can reduce complexity while empowering developers.

We’ll explore the dual observability role platform engineers now play - ensuring insight into infrastructure health and giving developers the tools they need to understand their services. With auto-instrumentation, semantic conventions, and self-service tooling, observability can become a paved path, not a pain point.