The investigation cost is a correlation problem, not a data problem. The data exists. It has just never been assembled automatically.
This is where a newer category of tooling is starting to take shape, sometimes described as operational intelligence: software that sits across observability, ticketing, and deployment systems and does the cross-referencing automatically, before a human ever opens a second tab.
When that assembly work is separated from the judgment work, the picture changes. The engineer in the war room arrives with a structured view of what happened, the deployment, the cases, the timeline. Their job becomes confirming it, refining it, and deciding what to do next. That’s the work they’re actually good at, and the reason they became engineers in the first place.
