Note that in a multilayered system, one person’s symptom is another person’s cause. For example, suppose that a database’s performance is slow. Slow database reads are a symptom for the database SRE who detects them. However, for the frontend SRE observing a slow website, the same slow database reads are a cause. Therefore, white-box monitoring is sometimes symptom-oriented, and sometimes cause-oriented, depending on just how informative your white-box is.
—— Google SRE Book, Chapter 6