This is a story about real pain and the maturation of a logging system. We’ll examine how the lack of standards breaks observability and why Kubernetes became the point of no return, forcing us to rethink our entire logging approach. We’ll walk through the requirements and architectural decisions that helped us regain control. I’ll share hands-on experience in building controlled, production-grade log pipelines - without magic and without “silver bullet” tools. This is an honest story from real production environments.