What is the difference between monitoring and observability? Explain metrics, logs and traces.

Summary

Monitoring checks known failure modes with predefined metrics and alerts; observability is the ability to understand new, unknown problems by asking arbitrary questions of the system's telemetry. Metrics are cheap numeric time series for trends and alerts; logs are detailed event records; traces follow a single request across services.

Longer Answer

Metrics answer "is something wrong, and how much?"; traces answer "where in the request path is the time or error?"; logs answer "what exactly happened in this component?". Correlating them (a trace ID in every log line, exemplars linking metrics to traces) is what makes debugging fast.

High-cardinality, structured events (wide events with many attributes such as user ID, region, version) let you slice by any dimension, which is the practical heart of observability. OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral standard for generating all three signals.

Key Points

• Monitoring: known questions; observability: new questions.
• Metrics, logs, traces have different strengths.
• Correlate with trace IDs.
• OpenTelemetry as the standard.

Deep dive: Observability and Operations