[zeeg]

imo Honeycomb pioneered this, and its the right baseline. There are limitations to it of course, and certainly its been done before at BigCo's that can afford to build the tech, but its extremely powerful.

The main argument for metrics beyond traces is simply a technology implementation - its aggregation because you cant store the raw events. That doesnt mean though you need a new abstraction on those metrics. They're still just questions you're asking of the events in the system, and most systems are debuggable by aggregation data points of spans or other telemetry.

As for logs, they're important for some kinds of workloads, but for the majority of companies I dont think they're the best solution to the problem. You might need them for auditability, but its quite difficult to find a case where logs are the solution to debug a problem if you had span annotations.