In this Back to Basics video, Mai Nishitani, an AWS Solutions Architect, explains the importance of observability for Kubernetes applications on Amazon EKS. She discusses why traditional monitoring tools are inadequate for microservices architectures and demonstrates how to implement end-to-end observability using AWS services like AWS Distro for Open Telemetry, Amazon Managed Services for Prometheus, and AWS X-Ray. Mai walks through a practical example of troubleshooting performance issues in a pet food company's web application, showcasing how observability tools can help identify bottlenecks and root causes. The video also covers the best practices for implementing observability patterns using Amazon EKS Blueprints, which allows for consistent environment creation and configuration across multiple AWS accounts and regions using infrastructure as code.