Todays post is more of a mini rant.
There is one thing, more than most things that really grinds my gears. That thing is when someone brings out a video, or a blog post with a similar name to this one. Yes I know, right now I am a huge hypocrite
For that I am sorry.
“Monitoring vs Observability” OR “What’s the difference between monitoring and observability”
Right, everyone. Drum roll please
There is no difference. They are the same thing. There. I said it. How many words was that? Ok, so far on my count.. more than I thought. I could make it shorter.
This to me is annoying because it is misleading to marketing folk who it turns out actually think there is a difference. So to correct this point of view i’ve decided to show below using diagrams why it’s not true:
So, take a look at this Circle, it represents Observability:
It’s pretty right?
I thought so. This circle is all that observability covers.
It’s the light, but not the shadow from the the Lion King.
Take this circle.
This is monitoring.
In order to have circle 2. You must first have something to monitor.
That is typically going to be a piece of infrastructure, maybe an application or a service.
In order to monitor any of these you need data to monitor.
That in it’s rawest form is going to be probably one of these three things:
Metrics | Logs | Traces
Wait? Where have I seen these before? oh yes that’s right! The three pillars of observability!
So to monitor something, you need at least one pillar of observability. To put it simply, monitoring is observability in it’s crudest most basic form.
The circle of Monitoring fits nicely in the circle of observability. It’s in Simbas kingdom.
So please, I beg of you. Would everyone stop being so stupid
