ByteByteGo Newsletter

ByteByteGo Newsletter

Observability for Beginners: Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Everything Around Them

ByteByteGo's avatar
ByteByteGo
Jun 18, 2026
∙ Paid

Observability for Beginners: Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Everything Around Them

A running service generates events constantly.

Requests arrive, functions run, errors appear, and each one is a thing that happened at a specific time with a specific context and a specific outcome.

Logs, metrics, and traces are three ways of looking at this same stream. A log captures one event as a line of text, a metric counts or aggregates many events, and a trace links related events as they move across services. Most of the concepts in observability, including cardinality, sampling, and correlation, are consequences of this structure.

In this article, we will look at the basics of observability in detail with concepts like logs, metrics, and traces explained in detail.

Events

User's avatar

Continue reading this post for free, courtesy of Alex Xu.

Or purchase a paid subscription.
© 2026 ByteByteGo · Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start your SubstackGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture