A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events | Jeremy Morrell

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2024-10-22 16:30:04

Adopting Wide Event-style instrumentation has been one of the highest-leverage changes I’ve made in my engineering career. The feedback loop on all my changes tightened and debugging systems became so much easier. Systems that were scary to work on suddenly seemed a lot more manageable.

Lately there have been a lot of good blog posts on what “Wide Events” mean and why they are important. Here are some of my recent favorites:

The tl;dr is that for each unit-of-work in your system (usually, but not always an HTTP request / response) you emit one “event” with all of the information you can collect about that work. “Event” is an over-loaded term in telemetry so replace that with “log line” or “span” if you like. They are all effectively the same thing.

While this idea has gained new momentum lately, it is not a new idea. Brandur Leach wrote about “Canonical Log Lines” both on his own blog in 2016 and as used by Stripe in 2019. And AWS has recommended it as a best-practice for ages.