What is the difference between monitoring and tracing?

Monitoring collects metrics about the overall system's state and performance (CPU, memory, network traffic, errors). Tracing tracks the path of a request through a distributed system, recording the time and details of each step.

Key differences:

Aspect	Monitoring	Tracing
Purpose	Overview of system health and performance.	Debugging and analyzing the performance of a specific request.
Data	Aggregated metrics and logs.	Information about each step of a single request execution.
Granularity	System level, general indicators.	Level of individual request and its components.
Examples	CPU usage, number of requests per second, errors.	Execution time of functions, calls to external services.

Monitoring helps understand when something is not working correctly. Tracing helps find where exactly and why. They complement each other.

Example:

Monitoring showed a sharp increase in 500 errors. Tracing a specific request with an error revealed that the problem occurred during an external API call.