Telemetry that reads like a field journal

Observability workshops stall when engineers treat traces as wallpaper. We borrow from field journals: each span carries a verb, an object, and the user journey stage.

Students pair on renaming exercises until a trace reads top-to-bottom like a story. Mentors intervene when names drift into hostname soup. The discipline transfers to metrics dashboards where RED names mirror the same verbs.

We close with a critique of over-instrumented services. The goal is legibility, not sticker shock on billable ingest.