Its weird you're only looking into logging exceptions. At previous companies we setup logging to record all kinds of actions from end users, including possible

Its weird you're only looking into logging exceptions. At previous companies we setup logging to record all kinds of actions from end users, including possible errors/exceptions. But as you figured, metrics are the end goal. I've previously setup mtail to create metrics from log messages and that gives me 90% of what I may need from logs at a fraction of the cost, speed and time. But logs are still useful for exploratory ad-hoc analysis, or the less common patterns which you're not monitoring or creating metrics for.