What is the difference between monitoring and tracing in the context of DevOps?

Monitoring focuses on collecting metrics and the overall system health (CPU, memory, network traffic, HTTP errors) to understand its performance and availability. This is aggregated information.

Tracing (distributed request tracing) tracks the path of a single request or transaction through various services in a distributed system. It helps understand how the request is processed, identify bottlenecks, and errors in a specific interaction chain.

Characteristic	Monitoring	Tracing
Purpose	System health and performance	Request path, service interactions
Focus area	The system as a whole	Individual requests/transactions
Data	Aggregated metrics, logs	Detailed request spans
Examples of metrics/data	CPU load, 5xx error count, throughput	Processing time in each service, correlation ID
Problem identification	Detecting system-wide issues	Identifying specific service/stage causing the problem
Example tools	Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix	Jaeger, Zipkin, OpenTelemetry

Thus, monitoring provides a "bird's-eye view," while tracing allows diving into the details of specific operations. They are complementary: monitoring can show where there is a problem, and tracing helps find out why and where exactly.