Learn more about the difference between observability, APM, and monitoring. Monitoring Monitoring is how teams observe and evaluate the state of their individual systems. It often uses predefined sets of metrics and logs to track errors and usage patterns. These can help answer simple questions about server utilization, response times, and throughput. Specialized monitoring tools can help reveal siloed issues that teams can anticipate. But issues are less predictable on more complex cloud-native applications where numerous dependencies are in play. Teams need a tool to help manage this level of complexity. APM Application Performance Monitoring (APM) — often considered a subset of observability — is a type of monitoring used to get in-depth insight into application code and dependencies. A key feature of APM is distributed tracing. This feature is used to track end-to-end transactions within applications. APM can help support and optimize application performance, identify bottlenecks, and enhance user experience. Observability Observability incorporates APM and traditional monitoring tools, but does not replace it. It offers a more comprehensive toolset built for today’s complex software systems that can reveal granular insights into the overall health and performance of your entire infrastructure. Observability uses logs, traces, and metrics collected and aggregated across all the applications, microservices, servers, and databases in your environment. This helps teams identify root causes of issues by looking at data and dependencies across the entire IT ecosystem. By analyzing properties and patterns using statistical and machine learning approaches, it provides actionable insights into the unknown unknowns in a system.