[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.)