There’s certainly elements of hype to the term since it’s new and a lot of startups and projects are trying to get the biggest mindshare. Monitoring to me is e

There’s certainly elements of hype to the term since it’s new and a lot of startups and projects are trying to get the biggest mindshare. Monitoring to me is exclusively about metrics and alerts. Metrics are really useful but they often don’t give you the whole context, and might sometimes be misleading. Eg you see a spike in cpu usage for a service; you probably just autoscaler and call it a day, and that’s the end of it. Having metrics is SO much better than not having metrics though, it delivered insights that were just not possible before. Observability to me is the next iteration of this process of understanding system behavior. Metrics are limiting, so maybe you look at logs. Well, they suffer from some of the same issues, so you try profiling, you try tracing. Ultimately the goal is to explore tools that allow developers to quickly get a truthful understanding of how their systems really work, and use that knowledge to improve their systems.