At some point, logs stop helping. Not because logging is bad. Because the system is doing too much. When you’re running something continuously, across multiple systems, logs turn into noise fast. You still log everything. You just can’t rely on it to understand what’s actually happening. The expectation Early on, logging feels like the answer. Something breaks → check logs → find the issue → fix it Clean. Linear. Works in small systems. What actually happens In production, it looks like this: thousands of log lines per minute multiple services writing at the same time retries creating duplicate entries partial failures that don’t throw clear errors You open logs and see everything. Which means you see nothing. The real problem Logs tell you what happened. They don’t tell you: what state the system is in what is currently broken what needs attention right now And when things run continuously, that’s what you actually need. What we started doing instead We still log.…