You can check the value of the monotonic clock at one point in time, do something, and then check the clock again at a later time. The difference between the two values tells you how much time elapsed between the two checks. However, the absolute value of the clock is meaningless: it might be the number of nanoseconds since the computer was started, or something similarly arbitrary. In particular, it makes no sense to compare monotonic clock values from two different computers, because they don’t mean the same thing.
