Observability vs Monitoring: Why the Distinction Matters
Understanding the fundamental difference between asking questions and answering them.
The Monitoring Trap
Most engineering teams believe they have observability because they have monitoring. They track CPU usage, memory consumption, request counts, and error rates. Dashboards display green/yellow/red indicators. Alerts fire when thresholds are exceeded.
This is monitoring. It answers predefined questions: “Is CPU above 80%?” “Are errors above 2%?”
But when a complex failure occurs—revenue drops 15% with no obvious error spike—monitoring goes silent. The dashboards show green. No alerts fired. Yet the business is bleeding.
True Observability
Observability is the ability to ask new questions of your system without deploying new code. It’s the difference between a thermometer (monitoring) and an X-ray machine (observability).
Characteristics of observable systems:
- High-cardinality data: You can slice by any dimension (user ID, transaction type, geographic region)
- Structured events: Every request carries context
- Distributed tracing: You can follow a single transaction across 20 services
The Cost of Vendor Lock-in
The observability market has exploded. Vendors promise “full-stack visibility” while charging based on data volume. Engineering teams face a choice: either sample aggressively (losing critical signal) or pay exponentially increasing bills.
This is a failure of architecture, not tooling.
The Foundry Approach
At Software Foundry, we design observability systems as first-class platform components:
- Structured logging at the application boundary
- Event schemas versioned like APIs
- Query layers that separate collection from analysis
- Cost models that scale linearly, not exponentially
The result: teams can debug production issues in minutes, not hours. New engineers can understand system behavior without asking senior staff. Incidents become learning opportunities, not firefighting exercises.
Conclusion
Monitoring tells you what you already know is important. Observability lets you discover what you didn’t know mattered.
For financial platforms, this distinction is existential.