Observability vs Monitoring
Monitoring and observability are complementary practices that ensure the health, performance, and reliability of your services. While they work together, they serve different stages of the incident lifecycle:
- Monitoring—The process of observing a system over time to verify that it is functioning within predefined parameters. It relies on known patterns and thresholds.
- Observability—The ability to understand the internal state of your system based on the data it exports (logs, metrics, and traces), useful for complex, distributed environments where failure modes are often unpredictable.
For most teams, baseline monitoring is already implemented to detect and rectify any issues that occur. However, observability is more complicated to set up, given that it goes one step further by allowing teams to trace a single request through an entire ecosystem to find the exact root cause of a failure. This allows teams to remediate and take action to ensure that similar issues do not occur again.
Key differences
The following table summarises the key differences between monitoring and observability:
| Monitoring | Observability | |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Measures and reports on specific metrics to consistently assess system health and spot any signs of trouble. | Collects extensive data (metrics, events, logs, and traces) to investigate issues across your ecosystem. |
| Goal | Tells you WHEN and WHAT is failing. | Tells you WHY and HOW this issue happened. |
| Traceability | Measures data within the edges of the system. | Traces signals emitted across disparate systems. |
| Data used | Relies on metrics and logs to know if the system is working as expected. | Collects logs, traces, events, and metrics to understand complex system behaviour. |
| Incident response role | First line of defence. Rapidly detects and notifies when an issue occurs. | Goes beyond monitoring. Provides depth and details required to understand the root cause of an incident. |
