Logs and Traces: Two Houses Unalike in Dignity

Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO) leveraged Honeycomb's observability tools to enhance the performance and reliability of their systems by integrating tracing into their .NET application stack hosted on AWS. Faced with intermittent failures in their provisioning service, IMO discovered that their traditional reliance on unstructured logs obscured critical insights. By adopting structured logging and trace instrumentation, they uncovered performance issues linked to the use of AWSPowerShell modules, which incurred significant overhead during module imports. To mitigate this, IMO transitioned to using the AWS CLI, resulting in notable performance improvements, including reductions in execution time at both the 50th and 99th percentiles. This journey underscored the importance of building observability into system foundations, allowing IMO to identify and address architectural issues proactively, ultimately enhancing system efficiency and user satisfaction.