Observability vs. monitoring vs. telemetry

Observability, monitoring, and telemetry are often conflated and widely misunderstood terms. While these three concepts are closely related, they have clear differences that are important to understand.

Telemetry

Telemetry is the process of collecting data from various systems or devices. Oftentimes these data types include logs, metrics, and traces (collectively known as the three pillars of observability).

Telemetry data is used to monitor system health or debug issues. However, strictly speaking, telemetry simply deals with collection of data.

Monitoring

Monitoring is the process of continuously collecting and analyzing data to detect and alert on issues. Monitoring can use telemetry data, but can also derive insights from other sources such as external data streams or manual reports.

The primary goal of monitoring is to identify problems, but it often cannot go beyond the “what” to the “why”.

Observability

Observability, on the other hand, is the ability to understand the state of your applications and the overall health of the system.

Observability builds on concepts from telemetry and monitoring to help analyze the situation and provide actionable insights.

The key difference between monitoring and observability is that the former simply focuses on detecting problems, whereas observability aims to provide a comprehensive view of the system’s state.