SageMaker Model Monitor and SageMaker Clarify

Question

Is there a relationship between SageMaker Model Monitor and SageMaker Clarify? For example, Model monitor uses Clarify or vice versa? My confusion is when I read model monitor documentation, I see bias detection and explainability and when I read Clarify's documentation I see the same services and it seems we can call them independently. Why we have two service that seems to have overlapping features (that's the reason I ask this question)?

Answer 1

SageMaker Clarify is essentially a container that produces bias and explainability reports.

SageMaker Model Monitor is a service that performs recurring monitoring on data captured from an endpoint or batch transform job. Two of the four supported monitoring types are bias and explainability, which is done using the Clarify container.

All that is to say, bias/explainability model monitors rely on Clarify, but Clarify does not rely on Model Monitor. You can use Clarify independently to run one-off jobs, or you can use Model Monitor to run recurring Clarify jobs.