Metrics and logs were the easy part, and I wasn't ready for traces.
It took me a while to get it, first getting a grasp on the vocabulary, then putting it all together and managing to see a tree. I won't blame myself too much, because a trace tree has several ways to fail silently, and I hit them one after another on the same code.
This is the post I wish I'd read first. Not an OpenTelemetry tutorial: the handful of things that stood between me and a working job > phase > task tree, in the order I tripped over them.
Why traces, and not just more logs
Logs and metrics answer questions you decided on in advance. You chose what to log, which counter to bump. They're proactive: you predict what you'll want to know, then instrument for it.
