Observability vs. Monitoring: Why Both Are Non-Negotiable for Cloud-Native Applications

If you’ve spent any time working with cloud-native applications, you know that things can go wrong—often when you least expect it. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole: every time you fix one issue, another one pops up somewhere else. The catch? You can’t just sit there and hope everything stays smooth. Without proper visibility, figuring out why things are breaking and how to fix them can feel like troubleshooting in the dark.

This is where monitoring and observability come into play. But let’s be clear—they’re not the same thing, even though they’re often used interchangeably. You could have monitoring in place, but without the right observability practices, you’ll find yourself flying blind when things go south.

So, let’s cut through the confusion. Monitoring and observability both play crucial roles in keeping your cloud-native apps stable. But how? And why do you really need both? Let’s get into it.

Monitoring: Your First Line of Defence

Let’s not overcomplicate it. Monitoring is like the fire alarm of your system. It lets you know when things go wrong, like when the CPU spikes to 100%, or your database starts getting chatty with 500 errors.

You set up your metrics and alerts so that when things go south, you get a call to action. It’s about defining the “known” risks:

• CPU spikes? Set an alert.

• Memory usage climbing up? Alert.

• API requests failing above 5%? Yup, another alert.

It’s the type of proactive strategy where you know something is wrong because you've defined the parameters in advance. But… that’s not the whole story, is it?

Because monitoring is limited. Sure, it can help you with known issues, but it doesn’t tell you what happened — or what could happen next.

Observability: The System's X-Ray

Now here’s where observability enters the picture.

In a cloud-native environment, things don’t break in predictable ways. You get these subtle, unpredictable failures that don’t trigger your typical alerts. Like when your API requests randomly spike due to a sudden load change, and suddenly your downstream services start timing out — but nothing actually “breaks.” That’s where observability comes in.

Observability is the key to understanding your system, especially when you don’t know what’s going wrong. It’s about collecting the right data — metrics, logs, and traces — and having the tools to connect the dots in ways that monitoring simply can’t.

If monitoring is the “smoke detector,” observability is the “detective” — helping you figure out why the fire started and how it spread, even if no one explicitly told you where the issue was.

The Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2024  highlights that 76% of organisations have centralised observability, up from 70% the previous year, indicating a trend towards unified monitoring solutions.

Why You Absolutely Need Both Monitoring and Observability for Cloud-Native Apps

Here’s the thing: cloud-native apps are complex. Microservices, container orchestration, and ever-shifting infrastructure environments mean things break in weird, non-linear ways. And this is where monitoring and observability work together like a team of specialists.

Imagine this:

• Monitoring tells you there’s a problem — your service’s latency has spiked past the SLO, or your load balancer is having issues.

• Observability helps you figure out why it happened — was it a misconfigured Kubernetes pod? Or maybe a database connection issue bubbling up from an underlying microservice?

In simple terms, monitoring alerts you to problems, and observability gives you the ability to diagnose those problems quickly and accurately.

Without Monitoring:

You’re blind. You’ll miss critical signals like API downtime, misbehaving services, or crashing containers.

Without Observability:

You’ll get the alerts, but you won’t be able to make sense of the underlying issues. You’ll waste time jumping between logs and metrics trying to piece together an answer, and in some cases, you might never get the full picture.

Best Practices for Combining Monitoring and Observability

You’re probably wondering: “How do I implement both effectively?” Here are some practical tips:

Suggested Read: Monitoring and Managing Cloud Containers: Tools and Techniques

Final Thoughts: Monitoring, Observability, and You

If you’re building and scaling cloud-native applications, don’t get caught up in the buzzwords. Monitoring and observability are both critical, but it’s how you use them together that really makes the difference.

Monitoring tells you when something’s off. Observability helps you understand why. And together, they give you the visibility and control your stack actually needs.

At VivaOps, we help engineering teams strike that balance — pairing clean, effective monitoring with deep observability, tailored to the way you build.

Thinking about levelling up your setup? Let’s chat.