Observability vs. Monitoring for AI Systems
Monitoring tells you when an event you predicted has actually happened. Observability lets you investigate behavior you may not have predicted at all. For most of the past decade, that distinction was something teams could afford to treat as a philosophical debate, because their systems failed in expected ways that had been seen before. A memory leak, a bad deploy, a saturated connection pool. You could build a dashboard and alerts for each and sleep reasonably well.