The Cost of Discovering
Problems Too Late
The expensive part of a failure is often not the bug. It is the time the bug spends operating in secret.
Late discovery changes the cost profile of every operational problem. A missed import becomes a reporting issue. A stalled worker becomes a customer support thread. A silent data quality problem becomes a trust problem because people made decisions before anyone knew the process was broken.
Infrastructure monitoring can tell you when a host or service is unhealthy, but many business failures happen while the infrastructure looks fine. The job ran, the container stayed up, and the logs filled with details nobody was watching. The missing signal was not machine health. It was work health.
Discovery is part of reliability
OpenTrace exists because operational code should report progress, notes, metrics, payloads, and milestones while it runs. The earlier a process explains itself, the smaller the gap between failure and response. Detection is not paperwork after reliability. Detection is reliability.