SRE & Observability

Observability vs monitoring gets treated as a vocabulary problem. It isn't. Teams that mix up the two end up with dashboards that look healthy while customers are stuck in a broken checkout flow, or with an observability stack nobody queries because no one defined what question it's supposed to answer.

Monitoring tells you a threshold got crossed. Observability lets you ask why, on the fly, about a failure mode nobody wrote an alert for. Both matter. Neither replaces the other.

SLO vs SLA: understand how reliability targets and contractual commitments differ, and how both help teams improve service performance, accountability, customer trust, and incident response.