Choosing the right signal
When we discussed individual telemetry signals in Chapters 6 to 8, we provided suggestions on when to use each of them. Let’s do a quick recap:
- Distributed traces describe individual network calls and other interesting operations in detail. Spans have causal relationships, allowing us to understand the request flow in distributed systems.
Traces document the request flow through the system and are essential for investigating errors or outliers in the long tail of latency distribution. Traces provide means to correlate other telemetry signals.
- Metrics collect aggregated data with low-cardinality attributes and provide a low-resolution view of the overall system state. They help optimize telemetry collection and reduce storage costs and query time.
- Events provide highly structured information about individual occurrences of important things. The key difference between spans and events is that spans have unique contexts and describe...
