Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry

Chapter 6: Logging – Capturing Events

Metrics and traces go a long way in helping understand the behaviors and intricacies of cloud-native applications. Sometimes though, it's useful to log additional information that can be used at debug time. Logging gives us the ability to record information in a way that is perhaps more flexible and freeform than either tracing or metrics. That flexibility is both wonderful and terrible. It allows logs to be customized to fit whatever need arises using natural language, which often, but not always, makes it easier to interpret by the reader. But the flexibility is often abused, resulting in a mess of logs that are hard to search through and even harder to aggregate in any meaningful way. This chapter will ...