racing is one of the hottest topics in Observability and Monitoring. There are myriad open-source projects, new startups, and entire conferences dedicated to it. But here’s the truth: While everyone building and maintaining software has heard of Tracing, only a select few engineers in a company end up using it.

It’s a non-trivial engineering effort to implement tracing across your architecture, regardless of whether you are using a commercial offering or an open-source project. It’s going to end up an expensive project, due to either SaaS or compute costs, and you will find that most of your engineers are struggling to work with this complex data.

And here’s the kicker: in most documented tracing use cases, you would have been better off using logs and metrics for a fraction of the cost and effort.

In this talk, we are going to explore how day-to-day issues encountered by the majority of engineers can be solved using classic logs and metrics. We will look at real-world incidents and discuss why agility is the missing secret sauce of modern Observability.