Why observability requires high-cardinality data

The blog post discusses the importance of distinguishing between monitoring and observability in managing complex, distributed systems like websites, highlighting that while monitoring provides alerts for known issues, observability allows for deeper investigation into unknown problems. It emphasizes the need for high-cardinality data to effectively diagnose and resolve issues by offering detailed insights beyond aggregated metrics. The article explains that monitoring tools often struggle with scaling and data granularity, limiting their utility in real-time problem-solving. It advocates for platforms like New Relic, which are designed to handle high-cardinality data, enabling users to conduct detailed queries on their telemetry data across metrics, events, logs, and traces, thereby providing comprehensive insights into system performance. The post also mentions the capabilities of New Relic's platform, such as its ability to process petabytes of data quickly and offer affordable data ingestion pricing, and encourages interested readers to explore further through their free account offering.