Monitoring vs Observability

Monitoring vs Observability

Understanding the difference between Monitoring and Observability is crucial in modern DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.

Aspect	Monitoring	Observability
Definition	Collecting and visualizing predefined metrics	Understanding internal system state from external outputs
Focus	Known issues	Unknown unknowns
Data Sources	Metrics, logs, alerts	Metrics, logs, traces, events
Questions Answered	"Is the system working?"	"Why is the system behaving this way?"
Approach	Reactive (alerts on failures)	Proactive + diagnostic
Use Case	Detect outages, track resource usage	Debug complex, distributed systems
Tools	Zabbix, Nagios, CloudWatch	Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, ELK stack
Depth	Surface-level system health	Deep insight into system behavior and relationships

🔍 Summary

Monitoring tells you what is broken.
Observability helps you understand why it’s broken.

Developing observability builds on your monitoring foundation — but gives you superpowers to debug, optimize, and evolve modern systems.