Observability Alone Cannot Prevent Outages

Observability has given teams rich dashboards, traces, logs, and metrics. These tools are excellent for seeing what is happening and understanding why something broke. They are not designed to enforce safety automatically.

In many organizations, the loop looks like this:

1. Something goes wrong in production.
2. Dashboards clearly show the problem.
3. Alerts page someone who is already overloaded.
4. Human action eventually stabilizes the system.

The system is still relying on a person to interpret data and decide how to react. The distance between seeing a problem and acting on it creates long, painful incident timelines.

Adding more charts and alerts does not change this dynamic. The missing element is a component that can treat observability signals as input for automated runtime decisions, not just as information for humans to read.

The system is still relying on a person to interpret data and decide how to react. The distance between seeing a problem and acting on it creates long, painful incident timelines.

RCP exists to turn observability into controlled, automatic reactions instead of leaving all action to manual incident response.