[hosh]

There are things you can do with metrics and logging that you cannot do with traces. These usually fall outside of debugging application performance and bottlenecks. So I think what the author says is true if you are only thinking about application, and not for gaining a holistic understanding of the entire system, including infrastructure.

Probably the biggest tradeoff with traces is that, in practice, you are not retaining 100% of all traces. In order to keep accurate statistics, it generally gets ingested as metrics before sampling. The other is that traces are not stored in such a way where you are looking at what is happening at a point-in-time -- which is what logging does well. If I want to ensure I have execution context for logging, I make the effort to add trace and span ids so that traces and logging can be correlated.

To be fair, I live in the devops world more often than not, and my colleagues on the dev teams rarely have to venture outside of traces.

I don't mind the points this author is making. My main criticism is that it is scoped to the world of applications -- which is fine -- but then taken as universal for all of software engineering.