In an episode of "Grafana's Big Tent," hosts Mat Ryer, Matt Toback, and Tom Wilkie explore the complex concept of observability, distinguishing it from traditional monitoring, which mainly focuses on metrics and time series data. Observability is described as the ability to understand the behavior of systems through various data types like metrics, logs, and traces, allowing deeper insights into system performance and issues. The discussion emphasizes the importance of monitoring on Service Level Objectives (SLOs) rather than just metrics, and highlights the challenges and value of distributed tracing, despite its high adoption cost. The episode also touches on the pitfalls of over-relying on dashboards and the necessity of strategic alerting to avoid overload, advocating for alerting on symptoms rather than causes, except in critical cases like disk space. The conversation demonstrates how observability can enhance system performance through methodologies like the RED method and error budgets, offering insights into effectively managing complex system architectures.