It is “just” a JSON-formatted log (or any other format really, just a set of keys and values). However the practice of collecting a lot of context per-transact

It is “just” a JSON-formatted log (or any other format really, just a set of keys and values). However the practice of collecting a lot of context per-transaction / unit-of-work and emitting that as one piece of data, storing it in a place that can quickly query across these and visualize is not very common across most orgs and teams. Feedback on this article has been a mix of “I’ve never heard of this before” and “we’ve been doing this for a decade, didn’t know anyone had a name for it” with not a lot of in-between. It’s not a new idea, which I call out in the intro. It’s not even a very fancy idea. It is really, really helpful if implemented though. Modern OLAP column stores help a lot here too since they make this type of exploration cheap and quick.