Developers Challenge Legacy Logging Paradigms, Advocate for 'Wide Events' in Modern Observability

The efficacy of traditional logging in modern, distributed software architectures is facing increasing scrutiny, with developers highlighting its fundamental limitations. In a recent discussion, a prominent voice in the developer community, known for their own prolific use of console.log, echoed sentiments from an article by Boris, asserting that current logging paradigms are ‘broken.’ The core issue stems from logs designed for a monolithic era, proving inadequate for today’s intricate systems where a single user request can span multiple services, databases, caches, and message queues. The resulting intermingled logs, particularly in production environments, render debugging a near-impossible task, leading to wasted hours attempting to correlate fragmented information.

The proposed solution shifts focus from simple log lines and artificial distinctions between logs and metrics to a ‘wide events’ philosophy. This approach advocates for rich, high-cardinality events that can power both debugging and operational dashboards. Modern columnar databases like ClickHouse and BigQuery, specifically designed for high-dimensionality data, are identified as crucial enablers for this paradigm. This allows for complex analytical queries—such as “show me all checkout failures for premium users in the last hour where new checkout flow was enabled grouped by error code”—delivering sub-second results and pinpointing root causes with unprecedented efficiency. This transformative shift turns debugging from ‘archaeology to analytics,’ ensuring logs accurately reflect system behavior. Furthermore, as AI-generated code becomes prevalent, platforms like Daytona are emerging to provide secure, sandboxed environments for executing such code, highlighting the broader need for robust, modern infrastructure to support evolving development practices.