Cofounder of honeycomb.io, coauthor of Database Reliability Engineering. Operations engineer, DBA, systems engineer, SRE, devops, etc. On call since I was 17.
The only good diff is a red diff.
It's not -- although there's a lot of overlapping domain knowledge, and you might say that monitoring is a subset of observability.
Monitoring is heavily biased towards alerting, downtime, outages, and above all actionable alerts. I think of monitoring as being to ops what tests are to developers -- once you know about a problem, you can monitor for it, you can test for it. Monitoring is about known-unknowns.
Observability is a property of systems, and it primarily is concerned with unknown-unknowns. A system is observable if you can ask any new question you want out of it-- if you can understand the insides by interrogating the outputs, without needing to add new customt instrumentation for each question.
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What are the biggest misconceptions about observability?
That it's a synonym for monitoring.
It's not -- although there's a lot of overlapping domain knowledge, and you might say that monitoring is a subset of observability.
Monitoring is heavily biased towards alerting, downtime, outages, and above all actionable alerts. I think of monitoring as being to ops what tests are to developers -- once you know about a problem, you can monitor for it, you can test for it. Monitoring is about known-unknowns.
Observability is a property of systems, and it primarily is concerned with unknown-unknowns. A system is observable if you can ask any new question you want out of it-- if you can understand the insides by interrogating the outputs, without needing to add new customt instrumentation for each question.