The Trio That Keeps Modern Systems Alive: Monitoring, Telemetry, and Observability

Hey there,

When production issues hit, the clock starts ticking for your SREs and the business.

Engineers rely on three core practices: Monitoring, Telemetry, and Observability, to prevent system failure. 

Misunderstanding their roles can slow down incident resolution and keep you in the dark about the source of your problems.

In today's issue, we highlight:

↳ The differences between Monitoring, Observability, and Telemetry.
↳ Why traditional monitoring practices are no longer effective for complex systems.
↳ How combining these concepts ensures your system is truly reliable.

Let's dive in.

Engineers often use the terms Monitoring, Observability, and Telemetry interchangeably, but they serve three distinct purposes in ensuring system reliability..

Telemetry is the foundational practice. It focuses on gathering the raw system data (metrics, logs, traces) from remote components. Without telemetry, you have no data to analyze.

Monitoring is the reactive function. It involves the continuous assessment of a system’s health and performance based on predefined metrics and thresholds. Monitoring tells you that an event has occurred (e.g., "CPU usage exceeded 80%").

Observability is the investigative ability. It shifts the focus from known metrics to gaining a deep understanding of internal system behavior and interactions. Observability allows you to explore the rich telemetry data to find the root cause of any issue.

Monitoring operates reactively on expected behaviors. Observability operates proactively, empowering teams to troubleshoot and debug the unknown issues that inevitably arise in complex, distributed systems.

Want the complete breakdown of all seven types of monitoring and a historical overview of these practices? Check out our comprehensive guide here.

After decades of use, traditional or "legacy" monitoring practices are struggling to keep pace with today's IT environment.

This is because monitoring was not designed for the complexity, scale, and dynamic nature of modern systems, which rely on microservices, containers, and serverless technology.

Some of the primary challenges legacy monitoring faces include:

Limited visibility: Traditional tools focus on isolating individual components (e.g., a single server's memory) instead of providing holistic insights into interactions across the entire technology stack.

Lack of scalability: Legacy systems often fail to manage the enormous volume, variety, and velocity of data generated by constantly changing cloud infrastructure.

Inflexibility: Older tools may lack support for modern deployment models like cloud computing and containerization, making it difficult to monitor dynamically orchestrated environments effectively.

The fundamental shift is necessary because complex system failures are rarely caused by a single known metric. They stem from intricate relationships between components, demanding the deep investigative power that only observability provides.

The goal is not to choose between these tools, but to integrate them for maximum effect.

A modern reliability strategy involves using telemetry for comprehensive data collection (logs, metrics, traces), feeding that data to monitoring tools to set immediate alerts on known failures, and then using the power of observability to perform deep, contextual root cause analysis.

This coordinated approach is essential for any modern platform:

• APM (Application Performance Monitoring): Tracks end-to-end transactions and user experience, providing a critical business view.

• Infrastructure Monitoring: Ensures the core resources (servers, memory) remain stable.

• Security Monitoring: Detects and responds to cybersecurity threats in real-time.

• Log Monitoring: Collects and correlates event logs for compliance and troubleshooting.

By moving beyond basic metrics to embrace a comprehensive observability platform, teams are able to proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve issues far more effectively, ensuring optimal reliability and a seamless user experience.

Ready to dive deeper into key factors for choosing the right observability tools and detailed comparisons with concepts like APM? Read the complete guide here.

And it’s a wrap!

See you Friday for the week’s news, upcoming events, and opportunities.

If you found this helpful, share this link with a colleague or fellow DevOps engineer.

Divine Odazie
Founder of EverythingDevOps