Let’s face it; monitoring and observability is one of a set of capabilities that help drive higher software delivery and organizational performance. These capabilities were discovered by the DORA State of DevOps research program. This is merely an independent, academically rigorous investigation into the practices and capabilities that drive high performance.

When looking into the differences between observability vs monitoring, it always pays off to start by factoring in their definitions. Monitoring is simply defined as a tooling or a technical solution allowing teams to watch and understand the state of their systems. Monitoring is mostly based on gathering predefined sets of metrics or logs.

Observability, on the other hand, is the tooling or a technical solution that allows teams to actively debug their system. It is based on exploring properties and patterns not defined in advance. For your team to do a better job with monitoring and observability, then they should be more than ready to report on the overall health of systems.

It doesn’t end at that since your team needs to report on system state as experienced by customers, not forgetting monitoring for key business and system metrics. Also, they must prioritize tooling to help you understand and debug your systems in production together with tooling to find information about things you didn’t previously know.

Monitoring and observability solutions are designed to provided leading indicators of an outage or service degradation. The same goes when it comes to detecting outages, service degradations, bugs, and unauthorized activity. Of course, we can never forget about the sheer ability to identify long-term trends for capacity planning and business purposes.

Like most DevOps capabilities, installing a tool is not enough to attain the objectives, but the tools help or hinder the effort. Never should you confine monitoring systems to a single individual or team within an organization. Instead, be sure to empower all developers to be proficient with monitoring.

After all, it helps instill a culture of data-driven decision making and improves overall system debuggability, reducing outages. Ensure you understand the difference existing between observability vs monitoring before taking the next step of action.