Observability 101: Logs vs Metrics vs Traces (and what to instrument first)

  If you’re building or running systems in production and wondering why incidents still feel “invisible,” this article is a clean, beginner-friendly Observability 101 guide that explains Logs vs Metrics vs Traces in plain English—and, more importantly, tells you what to instrument first so you get the fastest debugging wins without boiling the ocean.

Observability isn’t “add more dashboards.” It’s having the right signals when things break:

✅ Metrics → What’s wrong? (latency, errors, saturation, throughput)
✅ Logs → What happened? (events + context, structured logging)
✅ Traces → Where is it slow/broken? (end-to-end request path across services)

A solid order to start:

1. Golden Signals / RED metrics first

2. Add structured logs with correlation IDs

3. Instrument distributed tracing for critical flows

Read the full guide here:
https://www.cloudopsnow.in/observability-101-logs-vs-metrics-vs-traces-and-what-to-instrument-first/

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