> 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.
That doesn’t really give an objective definition of what wide events are, just an opinion and example in this one persons life.
I had to lookup wide events in the middle of the article, and I can’t say I can viscerally see and feel the benefits the OP was espousing. Just felt like an adderall-fueled dump of information being thrown at me.
What I get is: here's a thing that made a big improvement to how I debug systems.
Except, it turns out that the systems in question are very specific ones.
> 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.
Okay, but... as opposed to what? And why is it better this way?
>“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.
In the programming I do, "event" doesn't mean anything to do with logging or telemetry.
> 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.