Differences between monitoring, tracing, and logging

You will hear these terms being used interchangeably depending on the context and person you’re talking to, but there’s a subtle and very important difference between them.

Monitoring refers to instrumenting your servers and applications and gathering data about them for processing, identifying problems, and, in the end, bringing results in front of interested parties. This also includes alerting.

Tracing, on the other hand, is more specific, as we already mentioned. Trace data can tell you a lot about how your system is performing. With tracing, you can observe statistics that are very useful to developers (such as how long a function ran and whether the SQL query is fast or bottleneck), DevOps engineers (how long we were waiting for a database or network), or even the business (what was the experience of the user with our application?). So, you can see that when it’s used right, it can be a very powerful...