[renke1]

A few of my colleagues and I had the silly (?) idea that you don't really need logs anymore. Instead of log messages you just attach span events [0]. You then just log the span title and a link to that span in Jaeger; something like [1]. I've only really tried that in my private project, but it felt pretty good. The UI of Jaeger could be a bit better to support that usage, though.

Edit: Actually, those colleagues are doing a talk about that topic. So, if you are in Germany and Hannover area, have a look at [2] and search for "Nie wieder Log-Files!".

[0]: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/ruby/manual/#a...

[1]:

    tracing.ts:38 Usecase: Handle Auth 
    tracing.ts:47 http://localhost:16686/trace/ec7ffb1e23ddbb8dd770a3f08028666b
    tracing.ts:38 Adapter: Find Personal Board 
    tracing.ts:47 http://localhost:16686/trace/e22d342316ab0d7d23230864008e27bc
    tracing.ts:38 Adapter: Find Starred Board List 
    tracing.ts:47 http://localhost:16686/trace/129f89cee26d54cfdc38abea368d9b4e
    tracing.ts:38 Adapter: Find Personal Board List 
    tracing.ts:47 http://localhost:16686/trace/97948127d77501ff0c65a5db21b21b5a

[2]: https://javaforumnord.de/2023/programm/

[phillipcarter]

Depending on how greenfield a project is, you don't even need span events unless you absolutely require a timestamp for a specific operation with no duration. Just using spans for every meaningful operation is like having more powerful structured logs.

This approach isn't possible for a lot of systems that have existing logs they need to bring along, but if you're greenfield enough, I'd recommend it.

[glenjamin]

Using only spans is surprisingly effective!

I did a talk about this at QCon London last year

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/event-tracing-monitoring...

[paulddraper]

Agreed.

Same is true for metrics derived from spans. (Though for metrics, you don't need to sample, and for spans you might. So keep in mind.)

[klysm]

I've thought about doing this as well, but I like being able to use dumb tools to get an idea of what's going on. There's a lot that has to be working correctly to use traces. Or maybe I'm just scared of the tooling because I don't have enough experience with it yet idk

[pquerna]

You can also just, Log the spans as they are being created to stderr/stdout -- I've done this on a previous project with this approach of "spans first".

It made it debuggable via output if needed, but the primary consumption became span oriented.

[klysm]

Good idea yeah, but do the same notions of log level apply?

[morelisp]

This was the idea behind Stripe's Veneur project - spans, logs, and metrics all in the same format, "automatically" rolling up cardinality as needed - which I thought was cool but also that it would be very hard to get non-SRE developers on board with when I saw a talk about it a few years ago.

https://github.com/stripe/veneur

[kiitos]

You don't even really need to ship traces anywhere. You can just keep them in-process, and build an API on top of that in-memory trace data.

[mman0114]

I’ve been talking about the same thing at my place. I think it makes a ton of sense and then can kill logs almost completely

[nijave]

We tried this with Grafana Cloud/Tempo but hit trace size limits. Logs are still good for "events"