3 reasons why monitoring is different from observability

Issues arise in a tech ecosystem no matter what tools and practices are in place — some things don’t change. When they arise, IT teams can respond in two ways: 

Root cause analysis done right ensures faster response and recovery times.

Monitoring is reactive: Monitoring alerts are configured to notify teams of anomalies and issues as they occur in real time. While monitoring tells IT specialists “what,” it does not inherently explain “why.” Indeed, in distributed architectures, visibility across data streams is a common challenge. Siloed monitoring tools are limiting: engineers expend additional resources to manually perform root cause analysis while taking a reactive approach to systems management. The result? Slower detection, response, and resolution times, which can mean significant disruptions.

Observability is proactive: Observability facilitates deeper root cause analysis by providing richer context and visibility into internal system operations with historical data. By correlating different data sources and tracing the flow of requests or events through a system, engineers have a holistic view of their environment to pinpoint the underlying causes of problems more accurately. This analysis can be done in real time during an outage, or after the fact, for a proactive understanding of what went wrong. Ultimately, better root cause analysis capabilities mean more efficient operations overall.