What is the difference between monitoring and observability?

Monitoring is about tracking known failure modes. You define metrics and alerts for things you know can go wrong. It answers: “Is this thing I’m watching broken?”

Observability is about understanding system behavior from its outputs. It allows you to answer questions you didn’t think to ask beforehand — debugging novel failures you’ve never seen before.

Monitoring tells you something is wrong. Observability tells you why. You need both, but as systems grow more complex, observability becomes more critical for understanding emergent failures.