Engineering · Published April 20, 2026
Observability: Logs, Metrics and Traces
When something breaks, answering 'what happened' is worth more than 'the system is slow'.
Many projects log only errors, as scattered strings. During an incident the team greps files on a server and rebuilds a timeline, losing hours. Observability is not expensive; structure is what matters.
What each signal is for
Logs answer what happened: request parameters, stack traces, key business steps. Structured logs are far easier to query than plain text.
Metrics answer whether something is abnormal: latency, error rate, queue backlog. Good for alerting, poor for detail.
Traces answer where time went across services, essential once call chains grow.
A minimal approach
Give every request a shared request id, so logs, metrics and traces can be joined.
Emit explicit events for key business actions such as order creation or approval, to reconcile later.
Keep a thirty-day query window and archive older data rather than deleting it.
Observability does not come from buying a platform. It accumulates from the first structured log line.
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