How is observability different from monitoring?

When it comes to monitoring and observability, these two concepts are often confused with one another. However, they are different in many ways.

Monitoring is a process that involves collecting data from the application and storing it in a central repository. In other words, it’s an automated process which collects information about an application over time and stores it in a database. For example, if you have an application that runs on a server, then you can use monitoring tools like New Relic to collect this data.

Observability can be thought of as the ability of an application to generate logs or metrics that are useful for debugging or monitoring purposes. The key difference between observability and monitoring is that observability requires developers to instrument their code in order for it to work properly whereas monitoring does not require any changes at all (other than installing a tool).

Check out the use cases: Observability vs. Monitoring: Similarities, Differences, and Use Cases