What is Semantic Monitoring in microservices, and how is it different from standard health checks?

Semantic Monitoring continuously runs synthetic, business-level transactions against a live production system (e.g. actually placing a test order end-to-end) to verify the system behaves correctly from a user's perspective, not just that individual services report themselves healthy. A standard health check can report every service as 'up' while a business flow is silently broken due to a misconfiguration between services — semantic monitoring catches exactly that class of failure.