People often conflate monitoring and observability, and I can’t blame them. Marketers often use the terms interchangeably. However, monitoring and observability are two fundamentally different but related things. Understanding the differences between the two both technically and intuitively can help you become a better network troubleshooter, architect, and manager. After all, like many buzzwords before it, observability is an important concept if you can get past the fluff.

Network visualization is the practice of creating and displaying graphical representations of network devices, network metrics, and data flows. In plain speak, it’s the visual side of network monitoring and analysis. There’s a variety of different subcategories of network visualization, including network maps, graphs, charts, and matrices. In the world of IT networks, network management software will usually have some type of network visualization features built-in.

Every IT team has its own strategies, goals and objectives to help move themselves and their company forward as a whole. As part of this, management relies on the metrics and data reports from their networking department to help signal if the effort is making progress towards those goals and objectives. The data for which lives within the tools and systems used by techs every day.

Network optimization is a set of tools and techniques used to improve network performance and reliability. As such, it’s not a “one and done” operation but an ongoing process. Business requirements dictate a certain level of performance, but time and budget often limit what you can and can’t tweak. So, you optimize within those constraints.