“Teams won't instrument their code”
Head of Platform Engineering · Observability
A Head of Platform Engineering who says getting teams to instrument their services is the hard part is right: a tool only sees what it's sent. Don't promise the tool will do it for them. Start where it's easiest: ask which team cares most about reliability, and start with their services.
Practise it before the real call
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What the buyer says
Getting every team to instrument their services is the hard part. A tool won't fix that.
How to handle it
Listen
Hear "the hard part". The obstacle is getting many teams to do work they don't prioritise. It's about adoption, not technology.
Acknowledge
Agree that instrumentation is the hard part, and that no tool fixes it on its own.
Explore
Ask which teams already instrument their services well, and why. Ask which team cares most about reliability, and which services cause the most incidents. Ask what the platform team can make standard for everyone.
Respond
Propose starting with one willing team and their most important services. If your product reduces the work of instrumenting, for example through automatic instrumentation or standards the platform team can roll out, show exactly how.
Say this
“You're right. A tool only sees what your teams send it.”
Say this
“Which team already cares most about reliability?”
Say this
“Which of their services would you start with?”
Variations
- Engineering Manager: “My team doesn't have time to add tracing to everything.”
- VP Engineering: “We've tried to standardise logging three times. It never sticks.”
Questions people ask
How do you respond when a buyer says teams won't instrument their services?
Agree that instrumentation is the hard part. Ask which team cares most about reliability and start with their services, then show how your product reduces the work, for example through automatic instrumentation or standards the platform team can roll out.
What is instrumentation in observability?
Instrumentation means adding code or agents to an application so it sends logs, metrics and traces to a monitoring tool. Without it, the tool can't see what the application is doing.
More objections in Observability
- “Our monitoring bill keeps going up”
- “We can't send our logs to a vendor”
- “Outages haven't hurt us”
- “We already have three monitoring tools”
Practise it before the real call
Free to start. No credit card.