LinkedIn Draft — Insight (2026-07-03)

Something I wish someone had told me five years earlier:

Distributed tracing: the gap between having it and using it in incidents

Most orgs instrument distributed traces correctly and then debug incidents with grep. The investment in tracing pays off only when your debugging workflow changes — when you start from a trace ID instead of a log query. That's a culture change, not a tooling change.

Current state (most orgs): Target state: