What is Observability? A Simple Introduction
At its core, observability is the ability to truly see and understand what’s happening inside your application. It goes beyond just spotting symptoms—it helps you uncover the root causes of issues, even the ones you didn’t know existed.
It’s common to confuse observability with monitoring, but the two aren’t quite the same.
Monitoring focuses on known problems. You track things like CPU spikes, latency issues, error rates, and warnings. It tells you when something breaks—but only if you knew to watch for it.
Observability, on the other hand, goes much deeper.
It helps you understand the behavior of your application, giving you visibility into areas you may not even think to monitor. It lets you spot unexpected issues, unknown failure modes, and subtle patterns that hint at deeper problems.
Most importantly, it allows you to answer why something is going wrong, not just what is going wrong—often in parts of the system you wouldn’t normally inspect.
This level of insight comes from the three core types of telemetry data, often referred to as the three pillars of observability:
- Logs
- Traces
- Metrics
When you correlate all three, you get a complete, high-resolution picture of what’s happening under the hood of your application. Observability isn’t just about alerting you—it’s about empowering you to understand and fix what matters.
Benny Mathew 