Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I strongly disagree that metrics and logs are different toolsets, or that you would need both of them in order to properly observe your systems. And from the link: > Logging can be useful for some purposes. However, it’s rare that they’re the only tool for monitoring your code. And it’s even rarer that they’re the best tool. Metrics are a tool that take a different approach to logs, once you get beyond small system…
> Metrics are a tool that take a different approach to logs, once you get beyond small systems you need both. I talked about this earlier in the year: Quite the opposite - the "some purposes" I'm talking about are precisely the small scale. As scale grows, the use case of logs and metrics converges, and metrics become a strictly better tool.
Given that, you need both logs (individual events) and metrics. Logs give you crucial insight into individual interesting events such as single requests that bring your service down, but logs are orders of magnitude more expensive than metrics in tracking, storage, and processing. So that's why you use metrics for a much wider scope and for longer time periods.