Wide Events: A Practitioner's Guide to Enhanced Observability
This article introduces 'Wide Events,' an observability approach that enhances system monitoring and debugging by emitting a single event containing all collectable information for each unit of work. The author details how to choose appropriate tools (like Honeycomb), add rich attributes (including service metadata, instance info, build info, HTTP request/response details, user/customer info, rate limits, caching info, localization info, uptime, metrics, async request summaries, sampling info, and timing info), and handle errors and feature flags. Common concerns like excessive data volume, redundant data, and the relationship with existing metrics are addressed. The article highlights the significant practical value of this approach, showcasing how it simplifies debugging and reveals unexpected system behaviors.
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