Logs Are Not Enough

Checkout breaks. A user reports it. You dive into Kibana, grep for "500," and surface an error in payment. Victory? No. Payment was innocent; it called inventory, which called pricing, which choked on a cache lookup three hops away, buried in the shadows where your logs don't reach.

Three hours vanish. You jump between dashboards. You squint at timestamps. You ping teammates: "Did you deploy anything?"

I believed more logs would save us. So we logged everything. Request in. Request out. Every conditional branch. Terabytes accumulated. Yet we still couldn't answer the simplest question during an incident: what happened to this request?

Here's the truth. Logs are lonely. They live inside their service, ignorant of their siblings. Without a thread connecting them, you're not debugging, you're conducting archaeology with a broken shovel.

Remember the last issue? Retry storms melting production? Distributed tracing is often how you spot those storms, because one upstream timeout can spawn fifty downstream calls, and a single trace view reveals the cascade in terrifying clarity. These problems intertwine.

Old thinking: We log errors. That should suffice.

New thinking: Every request receives a unique ID that travels everywhere, through every service, queue, and database, and we reconstruct its entire journey with one click.

Why does this matter? Microservices scatter causality like shrapnel. The symptom screams in Service A. The cause whispers in Service F. Without tracing, you guess. You investigate blindly. You waste hours chasing ghosts.

With tracing? You pull up a waterfall view. The entire call tree unfolds before you, latencies exposed, status codes glowing, the exact span where everything collapsed highlighted in red.

Defaults to adopt: