Should you use a log or a metric?

Sentry distinguishes logs, metrics, and traces by the questions they answer: traces reveal request timing and execution flow but are sampled, logs preserve contextual state at specific decision points for debugging individual events, and metrics provide unsampled numerical signals intended for ongoing monitoring, dashboards, and alerts. Using a signup flow, the discussion shows how shared scope attributes such as signup method, plan, and user ID can connect logs and metrics to related errors and traces, while logs capture details like failure reasons or email-delivery status and metrics track trends such as signup volume, funnel completion, queue depth, and time to verification. Counters measure events, gauges capture current values, and distributions retain value ranges for averages and percentiles. It recommends counting existing logs during investigations but creating dedicated metrics for numbers teams expect to monitor over time, maintaining consistent event names and attribute keys across both, limiting Sentry ingestion to useful application-level data, protecting sensitive information, and avoiding reliance on sampled spans as the only record of important events.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.