As IT systems become increasingly complex, dynamic, and distributed (microservices, containers, cloud environments), traditional monitoring is no longer enough. This is where observability comes in, a concept rooted in control theory.

Observability not only allows you to track the system’s state but, more importantly, helps you understand why something is happening. It provides context and correlations between logs, metrics, and traces that together create a full picture of how your applications work.

Traditional monitoring vs. observability

So how does traditional monitoring differ from observability? The table below captures the key distinctions between these two approaches to IT infrastructure visibility.

In short, monitoring tells you that something is wrong (e.g., “The server is slow”), while observability gives you the tools and data to determine why it’s happening (e.g., “The slowdown is caused by a specific memory leak during request XYZ processing in service Z”).

The three pillars of observability

Observability relies on three types of telemetry data that must be collected and correlated within a single platform. Zabbix 8.0 aims to provide full support for all of them through its integration with OpenTelemetry.

Pillar 1: Metrics

• What it is: Numerical data representing measurements over time (e.g., CPU load, HTTP requests per second, database latency).
• Role: Used to monitor trends and trigger basic alerts (e.g., “RAM usage exceeded 80%”).
• Zabbix 7.0: Already a leader in this area.

Pillar 2: Logs

• What it is: Text records of events that occurred in the system (e.g., error messages, debug info, transaction logs).
• Role: Provide context. When a metric triggers an alert, logs help explain why the event occurred.
• Zabbix 8.0: Will deliver advanced log handling and correlation — entering a space traditionally owned by Elastic Stack or Splunk.

Pillar 3: Traces (Distributed Tracing)

• What it is: A visual record of the path a single request takes through the entire system (for example, a user click traveling through a load balancer, server A, service B, and database C).
• Role: Critical in microservice environments. It allows you to pinpoint exactly which service or function introduced latency.
• Zabbix 8.0: Through OpenTelemetry, it will gain native tracing capabilities, enabling full exploration of request chains — a major leap forward for observability.

OpenTelemetry: Unifying observability

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a neutral, open standard and toolkit for code instrumentation that unifies how all three pillars of telemetry data are collected.

For Zabbix 8.0, integration with OTel means it doesn’t need to worry about how the data is generated — only how to receive, store, and visualize it. This dramatically simplifies setup for users, who can use a single instrumentation standard across all their applications.

Why Zabbix 8.0 is key to open source observability

Before version 8.0, achieving full observability in the open-source model required combining three or four separate tools:

• Zabbix (Metrics)
• Elastic Stack (Logs)
• Jaeger / Zipkin (Traces)
• Grafana (Visualization)

Zabbix 8.0 (expected in Q2 2026) aims to consolidate most of these capabilities into a single platform — collecting, processing, and correlating Metrics, Logs, and Traces in one place. In doing so, it fulfills the definition of a complete observability platform.

Planning to implement Zabbix? Get in touch with our experts today!