Monitoring tells you that something is wrong. Observability helps you understand why. The difference matters most at 3 a.m. during an incident.
The three pillars
- Logs capture discrete events with detail.
- Metrics aggregate numbers over time for dashboards and alerts.
- Traces follow a single request across services.
Tie them together
The real power comes from correlation: jump from a spiking metric to the traces behind it to the logs for a specific failed request. Invest in consistent request IDs so that path is always one click away.