Observability Maturity in Cloud-Native Organisations: A Grounded Theory Study of Instrumentation Practices and Cultural Barriers

Abstract

Observability is widely advocated yet unevenly realised in cloud-native organisations. Using grounded theory methodology, this study analyses 34 in-depth interviews with SREs, platform engineers, and engineering managers at organisations spanning startup to Fortune 500 scale. Four maturity stages�Reactive Logging, Structured Telemetry, Correlated Observability, and Proactive Intelligence�are identified and theorised. Cultural inertia around blameless postmortems, instrumentation ownership disputes, and telemetry cost governance are identified as primary barriers to advancing maturity. Organisations that established cross-functional observability guilds and defined SLO-driven alerting budgets progressed through maturity stages 2.3� faster than those relying on ad hoc adoption.