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Observability and IT monitoring are two terms that are closely related but represent slightly different concepts. Both terms refer to the monitoring of IT systems and applications, but observability goes beyond classical monitoring and offers a holistic view of systems, as has been practiced by WOTAN Monitoring for many years.

What is IT monitoring?

IT monitoring usually focuses on monitoring the network components, applications, business processes (ERP/SAP) and IT services to ensure that they are functioning properly and performance issues can be resolved. The main task of IT monitoring is to generate alarms and warnings when certain thresholds are exceeded. This is usually done by monitoring metrics such as CPU utilisation, memory utilisation, network traffic and latency. The metrics are collected in real time and displayed in dashboards or other monitoring tools to enable quick decisions.

Observability, on the other hand, is seen as an even more holistic approach that aims to comprehensively observe and monitor IT applications and systems. In contrast to monitoring, observability goes beyond the monitoring of metrics and also captures other data sources such as logs, traces, and events. These data sources make it possible to obtain a complete overview of the system and to establish correlations between different events. The goal of Observability is not only to detect problems but also to quickly find their causes. Observability relies on a combination of data analysis and machine learning to gain a deep understanding of the system.

Another important difference between monitoring and observability is that observability takes a proactive approach to prevent problems before they occur. By comprehensively observing the system, potential problems can be identified early and corrected before they develop into major issues. Monitoring, on the other hand, is often reactive in nature and focuses on reacting quickly to performance problems as they occur.

WOTAN combines IT monitoring and observability

WOTAN Monitoring follows both approaches, because both IT monitoring and observability are necessary to ensure highly professional network management and to enable highly available and functioning business processes for customers, employees and partners. WOTAN Monitoring also monitors and shows complex connections with third-party systems and dependencies. Furthermore, reports with historical reports and predictive analytics provide important information for future decisions.

Observability and IT monitoring based on an example

To clarify the difference between monitoring and observability, concrete examples can be used. Let's say that an online shop suddenly has a high bounce rate, which is directly related to the technology behind it. Monitoring would detect these performance problems and trigger warnings when the bounce rate exceeds a certain threshold. Observability, on the other hand, would not only monitor metrics such as bounce rate, but also customer interactions to find potential causes for the high bounce rate.

What is WOTAN Monitoring?

WOTAN Monitoring is an IT monitoring solution that helps IT professionals monitor the performance of their IT infrastructure and ensure that it is operating reliably and effectively. WOTAN provides a distributed monitoring system that enables the aggregation of multiple satellites of large system environments.

IT monitoring and observability are important keywords for successful IT operations today. Ultimately, both closely related approaches ensure that IT ecosystems are comprehensively monitored and that problems of any kind are detected and solved before users are affected.