Understanding observability versus monitoring 

Your organization runs on data, and keeping that data flowing smoothly is essential. Optimizing your workflows often boils down to monitoring your infrastructure and understanding your hybrid environments. Two key concepts in data infrastructure are observability and monitoring. Although they’re interrelated, observability and monitoring play distinct roles in successfully managing your infrastructure.

Observability is all about understanding the internal workings of your system based on the data that it generates. It’s not just about knowing that something is wrong; it’s about digging into why that problem is happening. Observability gives you the ability to connect the dots across distributed systems, making it indispensable for IT managers who handle complex hybrid environments.  

Observability relies on the use of three key pillars to understand system behavior:  

• Logs tell you what happened.  
• Metrics reveal how much or how often something is happening.  
• Traces connect the dots across systems, showing you where things may have gone wrong. 

Together, these components work like puzzle pieces, giving you a complete picture of your workloads and environments. Observability is a key component of the NetApp^® intelligent data infrastructure, empowering you to make smarter decisions about troubleshooting, resource planning, and scaling to optimize your workloads.  

While observability digs into the why, monitoring focuses on the what. Monitoring tracks specific metrics over time, like server uptime, application response time, and CPU usage. When an anomaly occurs, monitoring tools alert you to the issue for quick troubleshooting and resolution.  

Tools like NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights provide machine learning–powered data analytics and alerts, helping you pinpoint anomalies across heterogenous environments. From a single dashboard, you can monitor your entire infrastructure to easily manage the hardware and software demands across your organization.  

If you think of your IT infrastructure as a car, monitoring is your dashboard displaying your speed, fuel levels, and warning indicators. Observability, on the other hand, is what happens when you pop the hood to figure out why the check engine light came on.  

Building an intelligent data infrastructure requires both monitoring and observability tools to help you gain complete visibility across your workloads and to get the most out of your data. Monitoring provides the alerts necessary to keep your systems running, but without observability, you lack the context to scale your operations or to prevent recurring problems. On the flip side, observability without monitoring leaves you unaware of immediate issues that need urgent action.   

To continue the car metaphor, you wouldn’t want to ignore your dashboard while you’re driving. But at the same time, if the dashboard just flashes warnings without providing the details for diagnostics, you won’t be able to fix the underlying issue.  

A comprehensive approach that integrates both monitoring and observability, such as Data Infrastructure Insights, provides optimal outcomes. You know immediately when an issue arises, and you have the knowledge to quickly resolve that problem while optimizing your workloads so that the problem doesn’t reoccur.  

Modern infrastructure monitoring solutions should do more than just inform you that something’s broken. They should provide actionable insights to help you proactively prevent future issues. Look for tools that are accurate, scalable, and user-friendly so that your team spends less time on managing alerts and more time on driving innovation.

Observability and monitoring aren’t just technical jargon—they’re the bedrock of a reliable, intelligent data infrastructure. By understanding the differences and by taking advantage of the strengths of both approaches, you can unlock actionable data insights, troubleshoot faster, and deliver better results across the board.

Start laying the foundation for an intelligent data infrastructure today: Request a demo of Data Infrastructure Insights to see firsthand how observability and monitoring can give you a competitive edge.