What is observability?
Monitoring tells you something is wrong. Observability tells you why, without shipping new code to find out.
In short
Observability is the ability to understand what a running system is doing, and why, from the data it emits: logs of events, metrics such as error rates and response times, and traces that follow one request through every service. Monitoring watches for problems you predicted; observability lets you investigate the ones you did not.
Also called: Monitoring, Error tracking, Logs, metrics and traces
Why it matters when your prototype goes to production
In a prototype, you find out something is broken because you are the one clicking. In production, your users find out first, and most of them do not tell you: they leave. The first job of observability is to make sure you hear about a failure before a customer has to report it.
What a new app needs on day one
- Error tracking: every unhandled error captured with the context to reproduce it.
- Uptime and health checks that test the database answers, not only that the server is up.
- Structured logs you can search by user, request and time.
- Alerts that go to a person, on a small number of signals that matter.
Looph is an example of the health-check point: its production build has a health check that proves the database answers, not only that the process is running.
Common questions
Is observability the same as monitoring?
No. Monitoring checks known signals against thresholds. Observability is having enough data to ask new questions when something unexpected happens. You need both.
Related terms
Read next
Sources
More on this: Production architecture & security · All glossary terms
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