Good monitoring and observability goes a long way in helping you detect problems more quickly when it comes to running production software, identify problems before they become outages, and ultimately save you and your users’ headaches. Keep in mind both monitoring and observability offer the foundation to improve the customer experience, reduce reliability metrics and improve Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).
It is essential to know the value monitoring can offer and the role it plays in strengthening observability. By this we are merely implying to understanding the differences between observability vs monitoring. While they both sound vaguely similar, they are related but not in the ways you may think.
Monitoring is aimed at helping teams identify problems and receive notifications about them. Things tend to be somewhat different for observability since it follows through to aid with problem identification, improving debugging and cause analysis. Also, monitoring leverages observability tools to track known metrics and failure points whereas observability offers tools to resolve unknown or unexpected issues.
In simple terms, monitoring is tooling to a technical solution allowing teams to watch and understand the state of their system. It is based on gathering predefined sets of metrics or logs. Observability is tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to actively debug their system. Well, it’s based on exploring properties and patterns not defined in advance.
A good point to always remember is the fact that there are a few keys to effective implementation of monitoring and observability. To give you a tip of the iceberg, your monitoring should tell you what is broken and help you understand why, before too much damage is done. The key metric in the event of an outage or service degradation is time-to-restore (TTR).
Remember, there are two high-level ways of looking at a system. First and foremost is Blackbox monitoring where the system’s internal state and mechanisms are not made known. The second is Whitebox monitoring, where they are. Be sure to factor this in when looking into the differences between observability vs monitoring.