Logs come in two forms: structured and unstructured. Throw your unstructured logs in the garbage bin if you can - they do very little to help systematically ana

Logs come in two forms: structured and unstructured. Throw your unstructured logs in the garbage bin if you can - they do very little to help systematically analyze systems. Structured logs are logs that adhere to a schema and let you attach key:value pairs of additional metadata, so you can add context from your app to those logs. They're extremely helpful for systematically debugging systems, but they're not correlated with anything. With only logs, you need to divine what led to such a log yourself, or manually re-create tracing within your logging system. Traces are basically structured logs but have correlation IDs that let a backend stitch them together. Tracing libraries also offer a lot more than just this, but it's the core of tracing. I like to think that tracing is just an objectively better form of structured logging.