Instrumenting
An estate that stalled at rung four of the logging ladder — JSON lines, no propagation — moving straight to OTel spans instead of climbing the rest by hand. Why the jump is smaller than it looks is here.
Building
A collector pipeline that runs the `spanmetrics` connector ahead of tail sampling, so RED metrics stay exact against 100% of traffic while the stored spans themselves are sampled down. Exact counts and representative traces, not a choice between them.
Evaluating
Backends against one question before any pricing conversation: can it group by an attribute nobody declared in advance, or does a new dimension mean a schema change and a new SKU. That split — trace viewer vs. event store — decides more than the vendor list admits.
Reading / chewing on
- Where the decommission lever undercounts itself — contracts that auto-renew past the migration finish line.
- Where OTel semantic conventions already answer a house-standard debate a team is about to re-run from scratch.
This is a /now page in the nownownow sense — what has my attention at the moment, kept honest with a date.