Observability is an emerging IT discipline that goes beyond traditional monitoring. While monitoring can assist IT teams in detecting known issues, observability takes it further by using logs, metrics, and traces to analyze a system's internal state.
IT teams can utilize observability tools to track knock-on effects across complex architectures and isolate issues at their source, providing them with a tool for full telemetry, including distributed tracing capabilities.
What is Observability?
Observability refers to gaining actionable insights from your IT and software systems, using tools proactively aggregating relevant data about factors impacting their performance and availability. It's an indispensable capability when managing increasingly complex, distributed IT environments daily in modern software development and cloud computing.
Observability goes beyond monitoring by providing insight into when and why issues occur, helping you pinpoint their source and resolve them quickly, thus improving user experience and preventing revenue loss. For this to work correctly, however, an understanding of collecting and processing all the telemetry generated by your IT and software systems, including logs, metrics, and traces captured through various tools you deploy throughout your IT environments, must exist.
The best observability tools can aggregate this data across your IT environment and provide you with all the relevant information to identify what's causing an issue and quickly detect new ones faster than traditional monitoring tools. They also reduce time to resolution by helping you troubleshoot more quickly and accurately than their counterparts can.
When your server goes offline, an observability solution allows you to quickly identify its cause by searching real-time telemetry data from multiple sources in real-time. With its real-time search capability and instant problem identification capabilities, an observability solution saves hours in troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing and fixing it before customers notice any downtime.
Efficiency can translate to increased productivity for your IT team and savings on overall IT costs. By decreasing monitoring and troubleshooting time, more time can be dedicated to driving business growth, such as creating and launching new products or services.
An observability platform is a set of tools designed to enable IT managers and developers to gather, aggregate, and analyze telemetry data to enhance IT systems' overall performance. The most efficient observability solutions combine capabilities like logging, tracing, and metrics into one all-inclusive platform that empowers DevOps teams to quickly identify problems at source and address them efficiently - saving both time and money while improving customer experiences while raising your company's quality reputation.
What is Monitoring?
Monitoring is monitoring system output and alerting teams when these numbers exceed acceptable thresholds. Monitoring tools typically have three components - metrics, logs, and traces.
Metrics quantitatively measure internal system performance and resource utilization using counters, distributions, or gauges. Logs document events like user interactions or state changes within an application or software system; logs log events related to user actions within software systems while traces show operations across distributed cloud environments to pinpoint causes and assess impacts to users.
Observability requires the appropriate infrastructure and tools for success, including a scalable, distributed telemetry platform that captures data in an aggregate form and developers instrumenting their code so it can be monitored using both standard metrics and custom ones that relate specifically to the system being monitored. With these in place, one can gain insight into complex, distributed systems while providing quality user experiences.
While observability and monitoring share some similarities, they also present distinct challenges. Both aim to detect and rectify issues, but only one sees all possible potential dangers--observability can take the extra step by uncovering those "unknown unknowns" that monitoring does not see.
For example, when monitoring a database, you might notice its CPU utilization has increased, or its cache hit ratio has fallen dramatically. Still, you would not know whether these issues are related to poor queries or indicative of an underlying problem that may result in outages or service degradations.
Monitoring is key for making any app production-ready, but to truly maximize its benefits, it must also include observability. This way, you can answer vital questions, like whether a change has caused an issue or your system is operating as expected. Furthermore, it's best not to assign this responsibility solely to one individual or team; multiple developers should learn the tool to improve debugging skills and reduce outages over time.
What is the Difference Between the Two?
Monitoring and observability aim to enhance system reliability by detecting issues, but they differ in what they deliver. Observability solutions utilize comprehensive logging, full-fidelity tracing, and real-time analytics for deeper visibility into IT environments while supporting an array of metrics and alerting mechanisms so teams can quickly detect and address any potential issues quickly.
Monitoring tools provide insight into specific endpoints and visibility of their functioning. At the same time, observability platforms offer visibility of the entire IT infrastructure - including microservices and complex systems - allowing debugging and root cause analysis to proceed faster, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) timeframes more quickly, and ensure business continuity.
To achieve observability, you must collect the appropriate data. This means gathering logs, metrics, and distributed traces that capture relevant outputs - logs, metrics, or distributed hints can all help reveal issues in an application or infrastructure that require advanced analysis capabilities that go far beyond most monitoring tools' basic capabilities.
When encountering issues with production applications, one of the likely sources is often component faults. Unfortunately, locating them usually requires manually wading through large volumes of data, which can take both time and resources; using an observability platform that automatically collects and analyzes this data in real-time can streamline this process and deliver actionable insights much more quickly.
Observability goes beyond monitoring, as it aims to provide a fuller picture of an IT environment. This may involve anything from tracking individual servers or applications' performance to examining interdependencies among microservices in a distributed cloud environment - something most monitoring tools do not provide enough insight into. Fortunately, observability technologies offer this valuable service.
Observability and monitoring are integral to ensuring your IT infrastructure can meet the demands of your organization. Still, to get maximum value, you must understand their differences and how they can work together to increase performance.
Which is Better for Your Organization?
Monitoring is essential in building an observable platform; however, monitoring alone will not suffice when supporting DevOps environments. Logging and machine learning must also be implemented to provide the visibility and insights essential for DevOps teams.
Observability tools collect and analyze data from your IT infrastructure, including cloud environments, on-premises software, and third-party apps. They use this data to gather logs, metrics, and distributed traces - three critical pillars of observability - which help provide insight into the state of IT systems. In addition, metric/log correlation service uses machine learning to detect anomalies quickly.
Implementing a scalable and flexible observability tool can give you greater insight into the performance of your IT environments but requires time and effort. Therefore, selecting one that can easily integrate into existing IT operations is crucial while providing access to all the necessary data.
LogicMonitor, a leading DevOps observability platform, can identify performance issues more quickly and accurately than humans alone would. This gives IT professionals more significant insight into what is happening within their IT infrastructure while taking measures to prevent issues before they arise.
The best observability platforms combine monitoring capabilities with real-time log analysis and machine learning to help your IT team move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive operations. Once in this mode, your team can tackle complex IT problems and eliminate bottlenecks using DevOps tools for faster innovation.
Make the most of your IT stack by selecting an observability platform that provides seamless visibility and logging for all aspects of your infrastructure, including cloud environments. Explore Dynatrace observability solutions' powerful features by scheduling an on-demand power demo or requesting a free assessment - this article is brought to you by this leading global provider of IT analytics and automated incident response solutions.
FAQ section
A: Monitoring is regarded as the capture and display of data, while observability is a means to analyze system health through its ins and outs.
A: In simple words, Monitoring aids us in giving information about something that is wrong, whereas observability makes you understand the reasons for it.
A: Through observability, we can understand an issue and understand the impact that it might have on other components. Whereas monitoring makes us tell when something happens unexpectedly within the system.
A: In simple words, the difference between observability vs. monitoring helps us understand whether the information that's being pulled from a system is predetermined or not.