---
title: "Your Logs Are Lying To You"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/your-logs-are-lying-to-you-eq23czgvl
source_url: https://loggingsucks.com/
type: article
source: "Hacker News"
published: 2025-12-21T19:35:51.007Z
updated: 2025-12-21T19:36:16.725Z
tags: ["logging", "observability", "distributed-systems", "opentelemetry"]
reading_time: 13
upvotes: 156
comments: 3
language: en
---

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# Your Logs Are Lying To You

**[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 13 min read · 156 upvotes · 3 comments

## Summary

Traditional logging practices fail in modern distributed systems because they produce fragmented, context-poor log lines that are difficult to search and correlate. The solution is "wide events" (also called canonical log lines): emitting one comprehensive, structured event per request per service that contains all relevant context—user data, business metrics, infrastructure details, and error information. This approach transforms debugging from text searching into structured querying, enabling complex questions to be answered with simple SQL-like queries. Key implementation strategies include building events throughout the request lifecycle, using tail-based sampling to keep all errors while sampling successful requests, and deliberately instrumenting code with business context rather than relying on auto-instrumentation alone.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://loggingsucks.com/>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@samadsaiyed** · 6 upvotes

> This was honestly a great read. I’ve always treated logging as just “something we do”, but this completely changed how I think about it. Also loved the way it’s written it feels more like learning beause of the interactive kick than reading a typical blog. Thanks a lot for this.

**@soubinan** · 3 upvotes

> This kind of gem, you just want to bookmark and share to your team.
> It goes exactly in my direction. I always treat logs as the main thing to maintain and improve (even more than metrics or traces). And this one come with a standardized way to apply, explain and share to others the way to do and the benefits.
> Great article.

**@phlisg** · 1 upvotes

> Opened my eyes on logging in general, definitely want to implement this in our apps we deliver
>
> Thank you for the excellent writing!

---

Tags: [#logging](https://daily.dev/tags/logging), [#observability](https://daily.dev/tags/observability), [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems), [#opentelemetry](https://daily.dev/tags/opentelemetry)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/your-logs-are-lying-to-you-eq23czgvl)