Today's rant: Both distributed traces and events don't give you much other than the overall flow and the components involved. Both signals are often very weak in debugging any latency problems. It is up to your capabilities to correlate them with additional data.
Given the overwhelming amount of work required to have them end-to-end, I understand why no one really cares. You invest a year or two of into tracing, yet it only crack opens the door. You gotta figure out everything else yourself.
I think there is little value in selling a tracing/event collection product if you can't sell the underlying platform and instrumentation capabilities.
Average company starts caring more about traces/events when they have visibility of:
✅ Traces from blackboxes, vendor services
✅ Automatically detailed networking events
✅ Annotations of platform events and outages
✅ Correlation with metrics
✅ Traces from blackboxes, vendor services
✅ Automatically detailed networking events
✅ Annotations of platform events and outages
✅ Correlation with metrics
It is crazy how much work there is and how expensive it is. Cloud providers have an extraordinary advantage when it comes to achieve any of these bulletin points, yet none of them has fulfilled this type of vision yet.
