InfluxData's Gianluca Arbezzano highlights the importance of observability in understanding complex systems, particularly distributed systems. Monitoring is just a starting point, and true observability requires tools, methodologies, and a mindset to learn about a system. Distributed tracing is an essential tool for observability, allowing teams to understand how requests flow through multiple services and applications. By using distributed tracing, Arbezzano was able to identify the root cause of a failure in his company's cluster creation process, which involved over 40 interactions with AWS. The ability to visualize and query traces provides valuable insights into system behavior, making it easier to troubleshoot and improve the development cycle. Observability is not just important for production but also for development, where it can help improve feature development speed and accuracy.