Observability vs Monitoring: Key Differences and Why Data Centers Need Both

[johny899]

Have you ever experienced a server failure when everything seemed to be going smoothly? This is incredibly stressful, right? You see the warning lights going off, alerts popping up everywhere, and you have no idea what is actually happening. This is where monitoring and observability come in.

Even though they sound similar, they perform very different functions, and you don't get the full picture if your data center has only one or the other.

What’s the Difference Between Monitoring and Observability?​

Monitoring tells you that something is wrong. Observability helps you understand why something is wrong.

• Monitoring simply watches your systems and sends you alerts when something fails — think of it like your car dashboard lighting up when the engine is overheating.
• Observability is looking at the system in a deeper way, allowing you to understand how everything inside the system is working together so you can better isolate and fix the actual problem faster.

Ever get a random alert at 3am and had no idea why it was happening? That is exactly what it is like to monitor without observability.

The Importance of monitoring and observability in a data center​

Any modern data center has to operate at a great scale and with considerable complexity. Data centers deploy cloud-based services, containers, microservices, and many other moving pieces. If you only monitor your systems, you will identify there is a problem, but you will have no idea what actually caused it.

This is the difference between monitoring and observability:

• Monitoring tells you numbers - CPU usage, memory, errors, and downtime.
• Observability tells you the story behind those numbers - Did the service not start? Where did it fail? How did it fail? Why did it fail?
• Together monitoring and observability give you a complete view that helps you solve all sorts of problems before your user ever sees an impact.

To think about it, monitoring is your camera and observability is the detective. The camera shows you what happened. The detective investigates to understand why.

Integration​

When monitoring and observability are applied side by side, your systems become smarter and more robust. You can:

• Identify problems before they become troubling.
• Recognize how applications and servers interrelate with one another.
• Automate some of the easiest solutions.

Utilizing tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog have essentially combined both monitoring and observability techniques with a single platform.