Monitoring and Observability by Cindy Sridharan.

Cindy Sridharan is on my “must follow on twitter and medium” shortlist, and this week she referenced a post she’d written that made me laugh, because we’ve been going through the exercise of operationally orienting around foundational engineering 'imperatives' this year, and transforming our language from Monitoring to Observability has been part of that.

The goals of “monitoring” and “Observability” are different. “Observability” isn’t a substitute for “monitoring” nor does it obviate the need for “monitoring”; they are complementary. “Observability” might be a fancy new term on the horizon, but it really isn’t a novel idea. Events, tracing, exception tracking are all a derivative of logs, and if one has been using any of these tools, one already has some form of “Observability”.