Essay argues wide events beat the metrics, logs and traces split
Original title: All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces"
The author says OpenTelemetry's three-signal model confuses practitioners and points to Meta's Scuba as a simpler wide-event system.
A Substack essay says observability teams are confused by traces, logs and metrics, and blames how OpenTelemetry presents those three signals. The author describes Meta's Scuba as a wide-event store: JSON-like field collections, sampling rates, and slice-and-dice queries during incidents. Honeycomb and Charity Majors are cited as earlier voices on the same idea. The post is cut off before the campaign-type example finishes.
Unconfirmed: The post is an opinion essay and the excerpt ends mid-example.
- OpenTelemetry is described as APIs, SDKs and tools for metrics, logs and traces.
- The author says the OpenTelemetry glossary has more than 60 terms.
- Scuba wide events store named fields and a samplingRate used to upscale counts.
- The worked example is an ad-impressions dataset grouped during an alert.
- Products
- OpenTelemetryScuba
Indicators of compromise
auto-extracted · verify before use · export allAll| Type | Indicator | Context |
|---|---|---|
| md5 | 542508c92f6f47c2916691d6e8551279 | be looking like this: { "Timestamp": "1707951423", "AdId": "542508c92f6f47c2916691d6e8551279”, "UserCountry": "US", "Placement": "mobile_feed", "Campain |
| md5 | 798de3c28b074df9a24a479ce98302b6 | ds", "UserOS": "Android", "OSVersion": "14", "AppVersion": "798de3c28b074df9a24a479ce98302b6", ... } Such events called wide, because it’s encouraged to |
From the original article
9 min read at isburmistrov.substack.com
This quote from Charity Majors is probably the best summary of the current state of observability in the tech industry - a total, mass confusion. Everyone is confused. What is a trace?
By bootlegbilly · isburmistrov.substack.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.