Monitoring vs. Observability: Understanding the Difference

👁️‍🗨️Monitoring is about performance metrics of infrastructure, such as CPU utilization and disk space.

🔎Observability focuses on understanding customer experience and providing tools to troubleshoot and improve.

💡Monitoring helps with capacity planning and decision-making, while observability ensures the app or service works for customers.

📊Monitoring metrics can't fully capture the user experience, which is where observability comes in.

⏱️Observability includes analyzing response time and elapsed time to ensure timely service.

What is monitoring in DevOps?

—Monitoring in DevOps refers to tracking and measuring the performance metrics of infrastructure, such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, and network throughput.

Why is monitoring important?

—Monitoring is important because it provides insights into the health of infrastructure, aids in troubleshooting, and helps with capacity planning.

What are the limitations of monitoring?

—Monitoring metrics can't fully capture the user experience, and it doesn't provide insights into whether customers are successfully using the app or service.

What is observability in DevOps?

—Observability in DevOps focuses on understanding customer experience, providing tools to identify issues, and enabling effective troubleshooting and improvement.

Why is observability important?

—Observability is important because it ensures that the app or service works for customers and provides the necessary data and insights for troubleshooting and improving the user experience.

00:00DevOps skills often mention monitoring and observability, which sound similar but have distinct differences.

00:23Monitoring focuses on metrics like infrastructure performance, CPU utilization, and disk space.

01:31Observability, on the other hand, is about understanding customer experience and providing tools for troubleshooting and improvement.

02:19Monitoring metrics can't fully capture the user experience, while observability helps bridge that gap.

02:51Observability includes analyzing response time and elapsed time to ensure timely service.