It may sound like the crypto space is having all the tongue-twisting fun lately with DAOs, web3, NFTs — but IT teams have recently worked new jargon into their repertoire as well. It’s worthwhile for non-technicals to get acquainted with, because there’s a growing list of thriving startups in this space.

Observability, in the software world, is when you measure and track a system’s state from the data it generates. There are three key pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. If you’re not an expert, you’d be forgiven for explaining the concept as “monitoring.” However…

“Put simply, monitoring measures something and then evaluates the result of that measurement against a defined standard to tell you whether something is good or bad...” explains the Grafana website. “Observability refers to gathering as much information as possible... to ask questions across that information… These are questions that are not anticipated in advance, like monitoring presumes, but rather questions that arise due to unexpected or novel events within a system.”

Grafana was one of three most-promising observability startups to earn unicorn status this year (along with Chronosphere and Cribl) and announced partnerships with Microsoft and Amazon to bring observability services to Azure and AWS. Epsagon has enjoyed a great year too. The Israel-based company offers serverless observability, enabling companies to search and troubleshoot events across microservices.

Epsagon makers first launched the product back in 2018, and updated the tech community last week with Epsagon 2.0. With the new launch, Epsagon has updated its pricing model, giving everyone access its tool for free, with up to 10M traces per month and unlimited alerts and metrics.

This comes a few months after the team announced its acquisition by Cisco. Cisco’s Liz Centoni sums up the value of the technology well in a blog:

“Cisco’s approach to full-stack observability gives our customers the ability to move beyond just monitoring to a paradigm that delivers shared context across teams and enables our customers to deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimize for cost, security and performance and maximize digital business revenue.”

The Kenobi watchOS app “elevates your macOS experience” by delivering helpful new features, like the ability to change presentation slides or quickly pause a movie from your Apple Watch.

We also love the name.

“Altamira brings artists, critics, fans, and collectors together into a community to experience, appreciate and transact art,” wrote maker Michael Facchinello. On Altamira, you can discover new art, upvote and critique, and invest or resell a piece.