Mixing everything into observability

One of the most interesting discussions on observability is how it differs from monitoring or even if it’s different in any way. Monitoring does not depend on observability; it can exist and has existed without the objective of making a system observable. You can monitor anything just for the sake of watching it. Nevertheless, you cannot fulfill observability without monitoring.

Observability is much more of a principle than its main technology pillar: monitoring. Monitoring vendors, products, and technologies will change over time, while this tenet will not. We like the idea that observability is the right mix of monitoring types, tooling, and data to bring the inner states of a system to the surface to determine its behavior patterns and predict the next problem.

With this idea in mind, we want to discuss other aspects of this principle. We will split this topic into three sections.

Outages versus downtime

Let’s clarify...