Monitoring vs Observability: Knowns and Unknowns
Understand how observability differs from traditional monitoring and why distributed systems demand the ability to ask new questions.
A Common Confusion
People treat monitoring and observability as the same thing, but they solve different problems. Getting the distinction right is foundational.
What Monitoring Does
Monitoring watches predefined metrics and fires alerts when known thresholds break — CPU over 90%, error rate over 1%.
All lessons in this course
- What is System Observability?
- The Pillars: Logs, Metrics, Traces
- Why Observability Matters Today
- Monitoring vs Observability: Knowns and Unknowns