Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Many often wonder, “Is there a difference between observability and monitoring?” The thing is as IT environments have become more complex, monitoring alone has become increasingly less effective. That’s because while monitoring is crucial, it isn’t particularly suited to tracking unforeseen or unexpected turns of events. That’s what observability is meant for. This guide will clarify what observability and monitoring are – and how they differ.

Splunk’s extensible and scalable data platform has been instrumental in helping ITOps teams fully understand their tech environments and tackle any IT use case with data streaming, dashboarding, federated search, AI/ML, and more. But, with the explosion of telemetry and the growing complexity of digital systems, ITOps practitioners who rely solely on a logging solution are missing out on critical insights from their digital systems.

Site reliability engineers (SREs) and security analysts — despite having very different roles — share a lot of the same goals. They both employ proactive monitoring and incident response strategies to identify and address potential issues before they become service impacting. They also both prioritize organizational stability and resilience, aiming to minimize downtime and disruptions.

A few days ago, I was in a meeting with a prospect who was just starting to try out OpenTelemetry. One of the things that they did was to create an observability demo project which contained an HTTP reverse proxy, a web frontend, three microservices, a database, and a message queue. Here’s a rough diagram: Their motivation was to try out OpenTelemetry and see how much effort it took for them to instrument their system.

LogicMonitor’s agentless collection has long provided customers with many benefits for collecting telemetry data directly from network devices. Recently, LogicMonitor added another feature, enabling the discovery of devices/sites and the collection of telemetry data from the Cisco Catalyst Center. Retaining options is essential due to the pros and cons associated with each approach.

As a manager, figuring out how to talk to your engineering teams about building a strong observability strategy can feel overwhelming. But don't worry! This post will help you navigate the challenges to unlock the full power of observability in your IT environment. Drawing on insights from over 40 discussions with larger enterprises, we've put together a strategy assessment that examines three key focus areas — what we’re calling aspects — each encompassing three actionable steps.