Observability vs Monitoring: Understanding These Not So Synonymous Terms

Quick Summary: Have you been puzzled about observability and monitoring? Think they’re the same thing? They aren’t, and knowing the distinction is at the heart of a winning approach. Monitoring watches your systems and lets you know when problems arise. Observability digs deeper, telling you the why behind system behavior. Master these concepts here and prepare to increase your system’s performance throughput.

Starting the blog with a fact - do you know, as per a report by Fortune Business Insights, we can expect the cloud computing market to grow and value around USD 2,432.87 Billion by 2030? Exciting!

With the above-given statistic we can clearly expect IT infrastructures to advance above on-premises data centers, including different cloud architectures (an important part of cloud computing). It also helps increase the need for efficient observability and monitoring tools and techniques.

Moreover, different organizations are deploying DevOps services, where observability and monitoring are important aspects for security purposes as well. However, these terms are mostly used interchangeably. It’s time to burst the bubble!

Certainly, monitoring and observability may seem to be similar notions, with quite a fuzzy line between them. Yet, when talking about observability vs monitoring, there are some prominent differences as well. Both software monitoring and observability join forces to find and identify the weak links within a software system and provide all the crucial data to resolve the issues.

Therefore, it's important to understand if something is going backward along the entire application delivery chain. And then determine the root cause and rectify it before it clashes with your business processes.

Quite interesting, right?

Simply stated, observability is a wider notion that involves monitoring, but software monitoring is a certain practice, also an important part of attaining observability. While both play a crucial role when integrating DevOps in your software system, monitoring vs observability can go hand-in-hand, still not being the same thing.

In this blog, we'll discuss these two terms and their relationship with each other.

Craft Custom, Resilient, and Agile Software Solutions with the Help of Top-Notch DevOps Services

Consult Us Today

What is Monitoring?

Monitoring is a technique of regularly collecting, studying, and examining data from a software system, application, or process. It helps monitor performance, and efficiency, enhance the benefits, and minimize the chances of errors and loopholes over a duration. In simple words, monitoring refers to tracking the state of a software system or an application.

So, why is software monitoring important? Software monitoring is crucial because it provides developers with quick and consistent information about your in-house and outsourcing solutions. This data helps shape deployments before the analysis, hence making software monitoring a significant component of businesslike management.

Contrary to a single separate analysis process or even multiple interconnected analysis processes, software monitoring integrates evaluative consideration into the time-to-time gathering, assessment, and data use during the deployment. Hence, organizations need to integrate software monitoring systems into their ongoing internal processes and experience multiple benefits of monitoring.

Moreover, based on whether you need to monitor the entire infrastructure or just CI/CD pipeline, you can evaluate the aspects, including:

• Resource utilization
• Memory usage
• CPU (Central Processing Units) use
• Detecting errors using the meantime
• Deployment failure
• Deployment frequency
• Productivity
• Software efficiency

And many more.

Take note – Given the points of importance for monitoring, in today’s rapidly advanced times, only opting for software monitoring alone isn’t sufficient. While monitoring is an ideal technique to recognize the issue, it hardly talks about the other part of the story, like why the issue occurred. Hence, to solve this issue, observability came into action.

What is Observability?

Observability in DevOps is the capability to examine the overall state of a software system, or an app based on the information generated, such as traces, metrics, and logs. It analyses the information and helps understand the software system thoroughly. Moreover, a software observability platform allows DevOps teams to monitor and understand the present state and health of various resources and apps simultaneously. It also helps DevOps teams better understand how their systems react and perform during the entire development cycle, a crucial aspect of system performance.

DevOps teams can vigorously identify any loopholes, analyze different issues, and find relevant answers by taking insights from the software system’s data. As cloud-native software systems are getting more complex, it is also getting more challenging to find out the possible root causes of any system abnormality or failure. It is getting more significant in the current landscape. Hence, full-stack DevOps engineers understand the benefits of observability information for IT and business as they gather and utilize it.

Software observability also helps answer multiple questions, including:

• What is wrong with the software system?
• What could be the plausible reason behind the anomaly?
• What’s the reason behind performance degradation?
• How should you rectify the issue?
• What was your software system’s state on a particular day, date, and time?
• How many SLOs should you have?
• Was there an SLO violation?

Additionally, software observability is divided into three primary pillars. Let's now understand the 3 pillars of observability.

• Logs - It is timestamped, permanent records of separate happenings that can recognize the uncertain things happening in a software system. It also provides all the necessary information about the changes that happened in the system’s behavior during the time of uncertainty.
• Metrics - It's fundamental in monitoring. Metrics are the measurements totaled over some time. They tell you about the total memory utilized by a method, the number of requests, or any service deal per second.
• Traces - A single trace presents the operation or process for a request or transaction, as it transfers from one node to another in the complete distributed system. Traces also have details of the components causing system errors, take care of the process through the modules, and find performance loopholes.

Hence, it is important to understand the 3 pillars of observability when opting for this DevOps strategy.

Now, coming to some important topics of our blog – observability vs monitoring, here we’ll understand the relation between both these terms. We’ll also find out the difference between monitoring and observability to make your work easier.

Maximize the Benefits of Your IT Investment While Developing Robust DevOps Solutions

Choose the Best DevOps Services

Why Observability and Monitoring Seem Similar?

When talking about the similarity between observability vs monitoring - both help to enhance the software's system authenticity and find out the issues and their cause for better productivity. So, whether enterprise DevOps solutions or any other DevOps solutions, they need monitoring and observability (and majorly hand-in-hand).

Moreover, they depend on the same generated data. So, if you're thinking of building a monitored or observable system, you must have the right outputs and the right data. Both these strategies can join forces and build a single major force, like Hulk and Dr.Banner (you'd understand if you're a Marvel fan like me). Simply put, monitoring is just a division of observability (more like a subset).

Most observability platforms are integrated with multiple monitoring tools into their interface. How does that help? It means there's no need for two separate sets of tools or platforms to handle both the activities - monitoring and observation. Wow! Isn’t it amazing? So, rather than deciding between observability vs monitoring, we can utilize them together (as a single entity). To know more about the parallelism between monitoring and observability – and their work together; you can go through the podcast – Observability: Taking monitoring to another level.

However, it’s still important to understand the key difference between monitoring and observability.

Observability vs Monitoring: The Major Differences

The easiest way to differentiate monitoring vs observability is to understand their purpose - monitoring alarms your software development agency about the issues and anomalies within the software system, and observability helps understand the root cause of the issue. So, rather than choosing between observability vs monitoring, unite them, as they work best when in unison.

Hence, here are a few key differences between monitoring and observability to acknowledge how they complement one another.

• Collection vs Condition - Monitoring is all about data collection to test and randomly examine your software systems. In contrast, observability provides you with the background of data accumulated, which further helps you to take relevant action.

• Process vs Prospective - Talking about the properties of observability vs monitoring, observability talks about the possibility to monitor a software system throughout the entire process. Monitoring is all about grasping the possibility to search for operations and track everything happening.

• Key Parameter vs Full Evaluation - Observability is an important parameter for application and custom software development, as it offers an in-depth analysis of the system. So, when comparing monitoring vs observability, observability provides a thorough analysis of the software activities and what to consider, where to focus, and what to prioritize when making modifications. Whereas monitoring focuses on some key parameters such as system uptime, response times, error rates, and likewise.

• Restricted vs Sustainable – Monitoring is like a restricted view, focusing on immediate system status and alerting you to current issues. Observability offers a sustainable approach, granting comprehensive visibility into your systems.

• The Property vs The Observing Act – Monitoring is the act of observing your systems, keeping an eye out for red flags or anomalies in performance. Observability, however, is a property of your system that allows you to look inside and understand its inner workings.

• Tracking vs Expertise - Monitoring is an important DevOps tool to utilize when tracking efficiency and performance. On the other hand, observability is the expertise or knowledge that helps you monitor and collect the most valuable data.

• Understanding vs Action – Monitoring is about action, tracking system health and jumping in when things go awry. Observability is about understanding, providing the context needed to figure out why issues happen and how to prevent them in the future.

Here’s a brief table stating – monitoring vs observability - to make you understand that, despite having different purposes, they can work together.

Coming to yet another topic; let's now discuss some important observability and monitoring tools.

Expand Your Tech Team and Scale Business Opportunities with Expert DevOps Engineers

Hire DevOps Experts

Observability and Monitoring Tools

Starting this section with an important question - How to manage challenging distributed systems efficiently? You require software observability and monitoring tools that help you adequately handle cloud environment challenges.

Observability tools gather and analyze logs, metrics, and traces to provide you with a complete view of what is going on inside your system. For example, they help you grasp the ‘why’ of problems. Monitoring tools, on the other hand, watch the system health indicators such as uptime and performance, letting you know of challenges when they crop up so that you can resolve them at the earliest.

The tool should help your DevOps engineers to understand the system more efficiently, meet the changing client demands, and provide automation while also making way for manual documentation.

While choosing a specific tool, you must ensure that it is capable enough to accumulate everything you require at a specific location, from telemetry data in your apps and servers to your stacks in your multi-cloud and microservices environments. It can incorporate tracing data, logging, and monitoring, and help to enrich your logs with visualization of the environments and valuable metadata.

Which to Choose - Observability or Monitoring?

Here's the thing - in DevOps, monitoring and observability go together - arm in arm. Although, when you need to choose the ideal tools to support and help your team, you need to opt between an observability platform and monitoring tools.

If you need to know when things go wrong in real-time, monitoring can help. But, software programmers choose observability when they need to analyze the root cause and rectify their systems efficiently. With an observability platform, programmers can work seamlessly as they don't have to solely rely on monitoring tools, including APM tools and telemetry.

Although, in the modern IT landscape, all the tools can work in unison to help different teams and deliver significant information on the availability, performance, and health of different software systems, applications, environments, and servers throughout your IT infrastructure.

Hence, once again, don’t think of choosing between – monitoring vs observability – and understand how well they can work together.

ConclusionBriefly, when it comes to observability vs monitoring, each technique has a crucial yet slightly different role to play in your DevOps methodology. And always remember, both are important for protecting your organization's security parameters against fraud, anomalies, and unauthorized users.While monitoring and observability often help to track performance and health, believe me, they also contribute a ton to keeping your software systems safe and secure. Constant monitoring and gaining observability throughout your IT infrastructure ensures that you recognize and address the issues quickly and efficiently, bidding adieu to all the loopholes and exploitable.So, thinking about adopting observability and monitoring?Observe and improve with Radixweb!As a certified DevOps services company, Radixweb helps develop advanced software solutions using DevOps integrated with observability and monitoring tools that gather and examine highly scalable data. We also use innovative tools and establish the right channels, helping you build a DevOps implementation roadmap for a much more aligned software delivery pipeline.Contact us today to learn more about observability and monitoring in the DevOps environment.