How Observability Differs from Traditional Monitoring

Summary:

Welcome to The Authors’ Cut Series
With a technical foundation in place, this session cuts through the marketing hype to deliver a concrete — and capability-based —definition of the term observability: what it is, why it’s needed, how it’s different, and how it comes together with monitoring. We make it real with a live Honeycomb demo.

Topics include:
- What Is Observability? Learn what capabilities define observability for software systems and how these practices are used to find problems in ways that are not possible with other approaches. (Chapter 1)
- How Debugging Practices Differ Between Observability & Monitoring. Understand the limitations of monitoring-based troubleshooting and why observability is a fundamentally different, exploratory approach. (Chapter 2)
- Lessons From Scaling Without Observability. Learn from a real example of scaling a service to millions of users and slamming into the limitations of traditional monitoring and architectures. (Chapter 3)
- How Observability & Monitoring Come Together. Systems vs software considerations, reimagining metrics in an observability-driven world, and determining what is right for your organization. (Chapter 9)

About This Series
Welcome to The Authors’ Cut series. In writing the O’Reilly Observability Engineering book, our goal is to help you achieve production excellence, based on our experiences building and operating commercial SaaS products at scale, and as creators of observability tooling for high-performance engineering teams. These are interactive sessions led by authors Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, and George Miranda where you’ll discuss concepts in the book, see how to apply them in Honeycomb, and get advice on strategy and implementation in your world.