Monitoring and Observability: Exciting Fields at the Crossroads of Technology, Organizational Strategy, and Human Interaction

I decided to write this article, blending both personal and professional experiences, to share my passion for the fields of monitoring and observability.

Given my background, I could have ended up in a natural history museum's evolution gallery because the rise of DevOps and its accompanying narrative tended to push system engineers and administrators to the brink of obsolescence.

Not that DevOps should be dismissed—it’s a major evolution, and the demand for it won’t dry up anytime soon. But with our obsessive habit of labeling everything, it’s essential to clarify that there aren’t just “DevOps,” the kings, and everyone else. The important thing is what we actually mean by that term. I work in a DevOps mode while focusing on monitoring and observability, but what truly matters is encapsulated in a Chinese proverb: 'It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or gray, as long as it catches mice.' In other words, the most important thing is to meet the performance and resilience needs of IT systems and thereby contribute to aligning IT strategy with the company's overall strategy.

I began my journey into monitoring with Nagios and its glamorous interface (though that doesn't take away from the fact that Nagios XI is impressive), with a detour through Centreon, ELK, and Grafana around 2016. And then, thanks to a professional opportunity, I plunged in full-time, embarking on this exciting adventure.

For many, my job wasn’t seen as exciting, often reduced to a tool-centric perspective. But having previously served as an IT manager and having been fortunate to work with a remarkable manager with an incredible breadth of experience, I found a domain that was truly enjoyable. I had grasped the importance of this cross-cutting field, its impact on organizations, and its influence on teams. While I didn’t want to lock myself into being a hyper-specialist, I found a discipline with many branches, and history has proven the evolution to be valid.

Why is it so fascinating? Why should you consider working in this field?

Here’s a deeper dive into why monitoring and observability are both rich and exciting fields, focusing on their technological, strategic aspects and growing importance:

1. Complete visibility into complex systems

Monitoring and observability offer a holistic view of systems, enabling not only an understanding of the current state but also tracing root causes of issues. As system architectures grow increasingly distributed (microservices, containers, multi-cloud), it becomes essential to track each component in real-time. This level of visibility is fascinating because it turns obscure technological environments into transparent, interpretable systems.

? Concrete example: In a microservices environment, observability allows you to trace each request across multiple services using tools like Jaeger (tracing) or OpenTelemetry. This helps identify bottlenecks or detect isolated errors in complex transaction flows.

2. Technological richness

Monitoring has evolved to incorporate sophisticated observability approaches that integrate multiple dimensions:

? Traditional monitoring: This includes classic system metrics like CPU usage, memory, and service availability.

? Modern observability: It adds logs, distributed traces, and application metrics, providing deeper analysis. Observability helps not only understand what’s happening (monitoring) but why it’s happening (tracing, logs, profiling).

Tools like Prometheus (metrics), Grafana (visualization), Loki (logs), and Tempo (tracing) are at the forefront of these innovations. These technologies are constantly evolving, offering innovative solutions to capture and analyze increasingly large and complex data sets.

3. Proactive problem-solving

One of the great transformations is the shift from reactive to proactive system management. The goal is no longer just responding to incidents when they occur, but preventing them or automatically remediating them with self-healing mechanisms.

? Auto-remediation: With tools like Rundeck or StackStorm, companies can automate responses to recurring incidents. For example, if a server experiences a CPU overload, an automated task can restart services or adjust capacity before users are impacted. This brings a remarkable level of resilience and efficiency.

This shift to a proactive approach is a game-changer in infrastructure management, bringing more stability and minimizing downtime.

4. The era of Big Data and distributed environments

With Big Data, companies collect enormous amounts of data, making observability essential for real-time processing and analysis. Metrics and logs are generated at a staggering pace, and one of the challenges is capturing, storing, and analyzing this data without overloading the system.

? Example: In infrastructures like Kubernetes, each container and microservice generates metrics and logs that must be aggregated and analyzed. Tools like VictoriaMetrics or Thanos help manage large-scale data on big clusters.

Observability sits at the intersection of Big Data and software engineering, requiring deep technical skills and data analysis capabilities. Its richness also stems from combining multiple disciplines.

5. Strategic and cultural issues: DevOps and SRE

Integrating monitoring and observability into DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices is critical. These methodologies encourage collaboration between development and operations teams to ensure system stability while enabling frequent, rapid deployments.

? DevOps: Continuous monitoring helps detect issues early in the development lifecycle, enabling agile deployments and fast iterations.

? SRE: SRE engineers heavily rely on observability to maintain service reliability levels while optimizing performance.

These new ways of working foster a culture of collaboration, where teams share responsibility for production services, leading to continuous improvement of processes and systems.

6. Involvement in digital transformation

Monitoring and observability have become strategic levers for companies’ digital transformation. They play a key role in the performance, availability, and security of the systems that underpin modern businesses.

? Digital transformation: For a company looking to digitize its processes, observability ensures that each step of the transformation is well-monitored, measured, and optimized. It serves as quality assurance for continuous innovation and competitiveness.

Executives, CIOs, and technical leaders increasingly understand that IT systems’ performance directly impacts business performance, making monitoring and observability a strategic priority.

7. Continuous learning and improvement

The field is evolving rapidly, making the learning journey both infinite and captivating. Open source plays a central role, as the community drives constant innovation. Engaging in these technologies means staying up-to-date, learning new tools, and regularly experimenting with new and complex environments.

? New approaches like distributed observability (for tracking flows in decentralized systems) or continuous profiling (to observe real-time resource consumption by code) continuously expand the possibilities.

In summary

Monitoring and observability are fascinating because they sit at the intersection of software engineering, complex infrastructure management, data analysis, and business strategy. They play a key role in optimizing performance, proactive system management, and digital transformation. For tech enthusiasts and innovators, these fields offer a space to solve critical problems while continuously experimenting with new solutions, making this one of the most dynamic and rich domains in the IT landscape.