Observability vs. APM: What to Know on Your Monitoring Journey

By: Jake O'Donnell

In the ever-evolving landscape of software development and IT operations, monitoring tools play a pivotal role in ensuring the performance, reliability, and availability of your applications. Two key disciplines in this domain are observability and Application Performance Management (APM).

This post will help you understand the nuances between observability and APM, exploring their unique characteristics, similarities, benefits and differences.

By the end, you’ll have a more complete understanding of these widely adopted practices to help navigate the world of modern applications monitoring and make more informed decisions for your own organization.

What is Observability and Why Should You Care About It?

Observability refers to the ability to infer the internal state of a system based on its external outputs. It allows you to understand what’s happening inside your applications and infrastructure by examining the most important signals they emit—telemetry data, generally logs, metrics and traces.

Why should you care about observability? The answer lies in the complexities of modern IT systems. As applications become more distributed, microservices-oriented, and cloud-native, traditional monitoring tools may fall short in providing a holistic view of the system.

Observability steps in to address this gap, offering insights into the performance, errors, and dependencies within your applications, and importantly your infrastructure, as well. This is typically delivered across capabilities including log management, infrastructure monitoring and distributed tracing, among others.

By embracing observability, you gain a real-time understanding of your system’s behavior, enabling faster detection and resolution of the widest range of potential issues, ultimately enhancing system reliability and user satisfaction.

What is APM and What Does it Provide?

APM is a well-defined and widely-embraced discipline within the broader spectrum of monitoring, focusing on analyzing and managing the performance of software applications.

Its primary goal is to ensure optimal user experience by identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks, errors, and other issues that might affect the application’s functionality.

APM tools provide a comprehensive set of features, including real-time performance monitoring, transaction tracing, and error detection. These capabilities empower development and operations teams to proactively manage application performance, optimize resource utilization, and deliver a seamless user experience.

Similarities and Differences Between Observability and APM

While observability and APM are closely related and complementary, they work differently and serve distinct purposes in the monitoring landscape. The main similarity lies in their shared goal of providing insights into the performance and health of systems. However, their approaches and focus areas differ.

Observability is a broader concept encompassing various data types, including logs, metrics, and traces. It emphasizes the ability to understand system behavior through diverse signals. APM, on the other hand, is specifically tailored for monitoring and optimizing application performance. While observability is about gaining insights into the overall health of a system, APM hones in on the performance of applications within that system and matters of end user experience.

Notably, APM focuses only on indicators of application performance, whereas observability’s focus on logs, metrics and traces widens the aperture to include into the health and performance of the entire IT infrastructure, not just applications. This is a critical differentiator within the context of managing the health and performance of today’s ephemeral, microservices-heavy applications, where the use of dynamic and distributed architectures require more far reaching and inclusive analysis.

Additionally, observability provides a critical level of more real-time and conclusive monitoring and troubleshooting that goes beyond traditional APM. Whereas APM provides insights into production issues based on set parameters, known error types and other forms of failures — most often related to the “four golden signals,” or errors, saturation, traffic and latency — observability offers the ability to surface less readily defined issues.

In this manner, while APM is highly effective at seeking out issues that you might expect to incur, observability excels at unearthing unexpected issues — or those that are more difficult to find and therefore more potentially disruptive. While APM is focused on providing the details of something wrong in an application, observability also provides greater context into the systems overall health. Observability is in this manner also more capable of predicting issues before they impact end users, whereas APM is focused more squarely on user experience.

Another key difference between the use of APM and observability lies in the implementation and ongoing use of the systems related to software engineering. APM tools typically require engineers to add code directly into their software to instrument the ability to monitor certain indicators within their systems.

This more intrusive approach adds complexity in its own right and makes it difficult to shift processes and tooling, when required. Observability most often ingests telemetry data in a more seamless manner that does not require hands-on coding, making it more flexible and efficient.

Let’s delve into some of the advantages of taking an APM-based approach:

Improved Application Performance: APM tools provide detailed insights into the performance of each component of an application. This allows teams to identify and address bottlenecks, optimizing performance for a better user experience.
Enhanced User Experience: By proactively monitoring application performance, APM aims to help teams detect issues that directly impact end-users. This approach contributes to a smoother and more reliable user experience.
Business Alignment: APM aligns IT performance with business goals. By understanding how application performance directly impacts business outcomes, organizations can prioritize improvements that have a tangible impact on their bottom line.

Observability vs. APM vs. Monitoring

To grasp the distinctions more vividly, let’s compare observability, APM, and monitoring.

Monitoring: Primarily focused on collecting and analyzing data from systems to ensure they are functioning as expected. Monitoring often involves setting thresholds and alerts to detect deviations from normal behavior.
Observability: Goes beyond monitoring by emphasizing the ability to understand and explore the system’s internal state. Observability encompasses monitoring but extends into logs, metrics, traces, and other data types to provide a comprehensive view of system behavior that is dynamic, holistic and real-time.
APM: A subset of observability, focusing specifically on the performance of applications and user experience. APM tools offer in-depth insights into application behavior, including transaction traces, code-level monitoring, and performance analytics.

Why You Should Use Observability or APM

The choice between observability and APM depends on the specific needs and challenges of your organization. Consider the following scenarios to determine when each might be more beneficial:

Consider Observability When:

Dealing with complex, distributed systems.
Needing a holistic view of the entire IT environment, beyond just application performance.
Emphasizing the importance of exploring and understanding system behavior in real-time.

Consider APM When:

Prioritizing the optimization of application performance.
Focusing on identifying and resolving issues within the application code.
Seeking a specialized solution tailored for monitoring user experience and managing application performance.

It’s crucial to recognize that the choice isn’t always binary. In many cases, a combined approach leveraging both observability and APM can provide a more comprehensive understanding of your system.

Logz.io’s Approach to Advanced Monitoring & Observability

In the realm of advanced monitoring and observability, Logz.io stands out as a leading provider of a unified, “full stack” approach. The Open 360™ observability platform gives developers, SREs and operations pros the tools they need to unify logs, metrics and tracing data in one location for a conclusive, end-to-end view of system behavior.

Open 360 also delivers a new, modern, observability-centric approach analyzing the health and performance of applications, as an alternative to traditional APM. With App 360, a strategic set of capabilities within the Open 360 platform, users get a centralized interface for visualizing and investigating application performance, without many of the technical challenges and high cost associated with traditional APM solutions.

App 360 is purpose-built for distributed microservices architectures running on Kubernetes and other modern environments, and enables stakeholders to visualize and investigate the most important signals, while correlating all the relevant information to truly understand their environment — from individual applications all the way down to the CPU level.

With Logz.io, you’ll avoid siloed telemetry and quickly achieve full application observability so you can answer difficult questions about the current state of your environment — at a fraction of the cost.

Logz.io’s approach combines the strengths of observability and APM, allowing organizations to gain deep insights into application performance while also exploring the broader context of their IT environment.

Best Practices for Using Observability & APM Together

As organizations increasingly adopt both observability and APM, it becomes essential to implement best practices for a synergistic approach. Consider the following guidelines:

Integrate Data Sources: Ensure seamless integration of data from various sources, including logs, metrics, and traces. A unified platform like Open 360 from Logz.io can simplify this process.
Collaboration Across Teams: Foster collaboration between development and operations teams. Both observability and APM are most effective when they serve as shared tools for the entire organization.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Leverage the real-time insights provided by observability and APM to detect and resolve issues proactively. This prevents potential disruptions to application performance.
Continuous Optimization: Use APM to continuously optimize application performance based on insights gained from observability. This iterative approach ensures ongoing improvements aligned with business goals.

Get Started With Logz.io’s Observability Platform Today

In conclusion, every organization must discern the precise combination of APM and observability practices and tooling appropriate to meet their unique requirements. By understanding the intricacies of each approach and recognizing where the best apply to your challenges, you can empower your organization to achieve optimal performance, reliability, and user satisfaction.

Whether you prioritize the broader insights of observability or the focused performance management of APM, Logz.io offers a comprehensive solution that brings these two worlds together.

Embrace advanced monitoring and observability today to stay ahead of the curve and ensure the success of your digital initiatives.

If you’d like to see App 360, our alternative to APM, in action, sign up for a free trial of Logz.io Open 360 today.