Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines
Great article! I always love hearing Stripe talking about their internals.<p>I've been using this practice and I agree that it's incredibly useful. I think because people tend to think in terms of "logs", they end up overlooking the much more useful construct of "canonical logs". Many fine-grained logs themselves are almost always less useful than the fewer fully-described canonical logs. Other observability tools often call these "events" instead of "logs" for that reason.<p>There's a tool call Honeycomb [1] that gives you exactly what this article's talking about in a really nicely designed package out of the box. And since it handles all of the ingestion and visualization, you don't have to worry about setting up Kafka, or the performance of logplexes, or teaching everyone SQL, or how to get nice graphs. I was a little skeptical at first, but after using it for over a year now I'm completely converted.<p>If you record fully-described "events" for each request, and you use sub-spans for the smaller segments of requests, you also get a waterfall-style trace visualization. Which eliminates the last need for fine-grained logs completely.<p>If this article seems interesting to you, I'd highly, highly recommend Honeycomb. (Completely unaffiliated, I just think it's a great product.)<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.honeycomb.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.honeycomb.io/</a>