Mr. Aditya Gupta

Beyond Logs: Why Tracing Should Be Your First Debugging Tool

Abstract:

When your app crashes or slows down, the first instinct is to check logs or CPU charts. But in today’s distributed systems—where a single user request might touch dozens of services—that’s not enough. Tracing gives you the missing context: a complete journey of a request across your system.

In this talk, we’ll explore why tracing should be a first-class citizen in your observability stack, right alongside logs and metrics. We’ll break down the basics of distributed tracing, what tools like OpenTelemetry (OTel), Jaeger, and X-Ray actually do, and why platforms like Datadog or Grafana Tempo make tracing data actionable.

You’ll learn how to use traces to debug complex bugs faster, track performance bottlenecks, and gain visibility into your services—even as your project grows from a college hack to a real-world product. Whether you're building a backend, a mobile app, or a full-stack system, this talk will help you rethink how you monitor what you build.