Observability Vs. Monitoring
Many thoughts and ideas are floating about monitoring and Observability. Some see them as identical, while others regard them as an extension of others.
Monitoring
Monitoring provides users with visibility into their information technology environments and is a critical component of information technology operations. Monitoring is a reactive process that entails tracking standard metrics and resolving known issues. Dashboards enable users to visualize the findings from tracked data. Troubleshooting is simplified because the majority of the problems are familiar or predictable. Based on standard metrics, the monitoring tool alerts users when something goes wrong.
Monitoring the modern applications
Monitoring became very complex with the adoption of microservices deployments, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures. The reason for this is that tracking information from a variety of heterogeneous and distributed applications is time-consuming. Additionally, inconsistency in information formats and data correlation is a significant cause of concern. Manually processing vast amounts of data is tedious for users.
Observability
Observability enables users to obtain information about the internal states of their software applications and environments from their external outputs. This method allows monitoring metrics, analyzing log files, and tracing distributed information to ascertain the system's internals.
The process of Observability is proactive. It aids in the resolution of both known and unknown problems. It provides improved discoverability through distributed tracing, which can lead to better analysis of application behavior. It facilitates troubleshooting and debugging by correlating logs. It is essential because it provides detailed information about complex, distributed, and cloud-native applications.
Conclusion
Observability is not synonymous with monitoring. Observability necessitates monitoring, each of which plays a distinct role. Monitoring provides you “What” went wrong with the systems, whereas Observability tells you “What” went wrong and “Why.”
Monitoring enables tracking system errors, usage, outages, and security attacks and alerting users as designed.
Along with the items mentioned above, Observability helps to understand better application behavior, user experience, chokepoints, monitoring unused elements of the system, resource drainers, success and failure rates, patterns, and load patterns, i.e., system performance under load or during peak times.
In the cloud engineer’s terms, Observability helps comprehend systems through the lens of the well-architected framework’s pillars, namely operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, and cost optimization.
