@Abby Bangser great question - Iād make the case that capabilities below the water line can be necessary to enable capabilities above the waterline, but those necessary capabilities arenāt valuable in their own right - theyāre only valuable after they enable capabilities above the water line.
^^ this is probably the primary observation that the model is meant to convey, any other insights are probably just consequences of this assertion.
Applied to the OTel collector example, maybe the team realizes that the operators need logs more immediately than they need traces (but can imagine a future where they could leverage traces as well)
⢠if the lift to install OTEL collector is equal to the lift to install a logs-only agent, the OTEL collector looks good b/c it enables an experience in the short term and gives the option for building an experience in the long term
⢠If thereās the logs-only agent is much easier and faster to install than the OTEL collector, the logs-only agent looks good
In both cases the team assumes some risk until (e.g.) a viable log search experience is actually delivered to the user. But the āIcebergā would caution against exerting any additional effort to enable traces if the team canāt point to the experience that the tracing plumbing will enable for the users.