Observability vs Monitoring: The Key Differences DevOps Should Know
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Loading... - Mathias Kaiser
- 04 Jul 2022
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Did you know Monitoring and Observability aren’t interchangeable? They differ in both their focus and approach.
A monitoring system often focuses on the system’s response to some event, such as a request, and the state of the system at that point in time.
An Observability system focuses on the usage of a system and the actions of individuals that use a system, such as sending messages or reading data.
While monitoring focuses on the response to an event, an Observability system concentrates only on the usage and interactions of the system.
What Is Monitoring?
The term monitoring is often used to measure specific data or quantities to help developers identify and react to problems in a software system.
What Is the Aim of Monitoring?
Monitoring is commonly used in event-driven systems — where there is limited control over how the system will behave — to ensure that expected behavior is observed by the developer so that the programmers can address it.
How Does Monitoring Work?
In a distributed system, monitoring tools, typically written in a distributed programming language like Go, provide a way to monitor the observable effects of components, services, and interactions. For instance, a cloud-based communications platform may want to monitor the effectiveness of its call recording feature.
The added flexibility of a distributed system’s framework that includes tools for Monitoring makes it possible to instrument infrastructure in a distributed system with tools suitable for the distributed environment while also having an offline, reliable set of metrics.
What Is Observability?
Observability is the measure of knowledge and understanding you can garner from a system, usually determined through the collection of metrics, logs, or traces. Read More...
