What does a realistic path from low to high observability maturity look like, phase by phase?

Foundation → unify the data → make relationships visible → connect to the business → automate: five phases, each of which depends on the one before it.

* Five phases; every arrow is a dependency — skip one and you end up back at phase 2. *

1. Phase 1 — build the foundation. Establish monitoring, central dashboards, basic alerting. Without a baseline nothing later has anything to compare against.
2. Phase 2 — unify the data. Central log management, introduce tracing, adopt OpenTelemetry. This is the phase that makes correlation possible at all, and the one most often skipped.
3. Phase 3 — make relationships visible. Service maps, dependency analysis, end-to-end tracing across whole user journeys.
4. Phase 4 — establish business relevance. Define SLOs, measure customer experience, integrate business KPIs, so that the platform speaks in terms the organisation funds.
5. Phase 5 — automate. AIOps, predictive analytics, self-healing workflows.

The dependency chain is the lesson: you cannot build service maps without traces (phase 2 before 3), you cannot define meaningful SLOs without knowing what users experience (phase 3 before 4), and automated remediation on top of unreliable data automates your errors (phase 4 before 5). Organisations that jump straight to the interesting end usually end up back at phase 2.