Monitoring and Observability vs Traditional Monitoring

Developers should learn and implement monitoring and observability to maintain system reliability, detect anomalies, and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents meets developers should learn traditional monitoring when working in legacy or on-premises environments, or when maintaining systems with predictable, stable workloads where historical baselines are effective. Here's our take.

Monitoring and Observability

Nice Pick

Developers should learn and implement monitoring and observability to maintain system reliability, detect anomalies, and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents

Pros

• It is essential for modern applications, especially microservices and cloud-native architectures, where traditional monitoring falls short due to increased complexity
• Related to: metrics-collection, distributed-tracing

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Traditional Monitoring

Developers should learn traditional monitoring when working in legacy or on-premises environments, or when maintaining systems with predictable, stable workloads where historical baselines are effective

Pros

• It is crucial for ensuring system reliability, compliance with SLAs, and troubleshooting known issues in production environments, such as server crashes or network outages
• Related to: log-management, alerting-systems

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Monitoring and Observability is a concept while Traditional Monitoring is a methodology. We picked Monitoring and Observability based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Monitoring and Observability wins

Based on overall popularity. Monitoring and Observability is more widely used, but Traditional Monitoring excels in its own space.