Observability vs. Logging vs. Monitoring
Explore how logging monitoring and observability provide distinct but complementary visibility into AWS applications. Learn to use logs for event history, monitoring for live system health, and observability for deep root cause analysis with AWS tools like CloudWatch and X-Ray.
Imagine a developer working on the checkout flow of an e-commerce application. A few hours after the feature goes live, a user reports the following error:
“My payment failed with error code 5003.”
In modern AWS architectures, especially those built with microservices and serverless, we need complete visibility into the system to troubleshoot effectively. This is where the three concepts—logging, monitoring, and observability—become essential. Although they are related, each serves a different purpose.
What is logging?
Let’s begin with logging. Imagine a user reporting a problem. To understand what went wrong, the developer needs a historical record of events during that transaction. Logs provide this.
Logging is the first and most fundamental layer of visibility, acting like a record book that captures events, errors, and status updates. It’s the simplest way an application communicates what it’s doing. For example, while writing code, developers often include error messages or other log entries so they can later trace issues and understand the context ...