Keeping track of metrics requires teams to know what metrics to follow. Conversely, observability helps teams determine what metrics are essential by monitoring system performance, asking pertinent questions and noting relevant information. Thus, observability identifies areas for monitoring.
Many organizations adopt cloud-native technologies through microservices, containers, or serverless solutions. Tracing an event to its source with these distributed technologies became increasingly difficult.
In the past, monitoring tools could not adequately track communication pathways and interdependencies in cloud computing systems. Observability tools were introduced to improve the performance of information technology (IT) systems by watching system performance.
Observability is the process of monitoring and measuring the internal status of a system by evaluating its output. The output is comprised of logs, traces, and metrics. Observability aims to understand what happens across various environments, networks, and technologies, with the goal of resolving issues sooner rather than later.
Many DevOps teams refer to monitoring and observability interchangeably. There are significant differences between these concepts. Monitoring allows you to watch the state of your system based on predetermined metrics and logs. Observability is derived from control theory and understands the status of your internal systems by the outputs.
Monitoring requires teams to know what metrics to follow and helps keep track of them. On the other hand, observability tells teams what metrics are essential by watching overall system performance, asking relevant questions, and noting important information. In other words, observability identifies areas that need to be monitored.