The traditional approach to application monitoring, which relies on centralized architecture and code instrumentation, was designed for single-tiered monolith applications. However, with the shift to microservices architectures, data volumes have increased dramatically, leading to a trade-off between visibility depth and cost. Most monitoring tools offer random sampling to control data volume, but this can lead to missing interesting requests or storing irrelevant data. In contrast, Groundcover's distributed architecture allows for smart capturing of only relevant data, reducing the visibility depth-cost tradeoff and enabling engineers to focus on what matters most. By leveraging metrics and filtering out unnecessary data, Groundcover provides a more efficient and cost-effective way to monitor applications.