Monitoring, Logging, and Tracing are often highlighted as the three fundamental pillars of a contemporary Observability framework. Conventional wisdom suggests that all three pieces of technology are equally critical and have their own place in the Observability stack. As more of the world shifts to the cloud, containerized, and distributed systems, will one of these pillars end up becoming more critical than the other?
We predict that this will most likely be the case. In this article, we compare the roles of two of these Observability pillars, Distributed Tracing vs. Logging, and see which best suits the needs of an increasingly cloud-native world.