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🚀 Understanding Traces, Logs & Metrics: The Trio Powering Observability 🛠️

· devops

If you're building or maintaining modern applications, you've likely come across these three terms.

While they all help you understand what's going on under the hood, they play very different roles.

Here's a quick breakdown:

🔍 Traces

- Show the journey of a single request through a distributed system

- Great for pinpointing bottlenecks and debugging latency issues

- Think of it as a GPS route for your API calls 🗺️

📄 Logs

- Record discrete events with contextual information

- Ideal for deep dives and forensic analysis after something breaks

- Structured or unstructured text entries that tell stories 📘

📊 Metrics

- Numeric values that represent system health over time

- Great for dashboards, alerts, and trends

- Tell you how often or how much something happens 📈

🎯 Together, they give a 360° view of system behavior—crucial for monitoring, debugging, and improving performance.

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