You can use PHP's system logger and native logging functions to log errors, but also track the performance of API calls and function calls, or count the occurrence of significant events in your applications. Storing logs in a central file gives you flexibility for processing and analyzing them later on. The Monolog library provides more options for customizing how your logs are formatted and routed. You can create JSON-formatted logs with metadata using the `JsonFormatter`. Monolog also allows you to use processors to log uniform data, assign appropriate log levels to events of different types, and capture PHP exceptions and arbitrary events. Centralizing and storing your logs in a platform like Datadog enables you to offload log processing and long-term storage, aggregate logs from all hosts, and troubleshoot incidents more efficiently.