# Logging Sucks

Boris Tane's argument that traditional logging is broken for distributed systems and that "wide events" — one comprehensive, high-cardinality structured event per request per service — are the fix. Log what happened to the request, not what your code is doing.

**Type:** article
**Added:** 2026-07-04
**Author:** [Boris Tane](https://boristane.com)
**Link:** https://loggingsucks.com/
**Topics:** Infrastructure, Backend
**Tags:** observability, tracing

---

Logging was designed for monoliths. Once a single request fans out across 15+ services, conventional logs turn into noise — 17 lines for one successful request, 130,000+ lines per second at scale — because they optimize for writing, not querying. OpenTelemetry doesn't fix this; it's a delivery mechanism, not a mental model.

> Instead of logging _what your code is doing_, log _what happened to this request_.

The proposed fix is **wide events** (canonical log lines): emit one comprehensive, high-cardinality event per request per service, carrying everything you'd want at query time:

- Infrastructure context — service, version, region, deployment
- Request details — method, path, status, duration
- User/business context — subscription tier, lifetime value, cart contents
- Error details — type, code, whether it's retriable
- Feature flags and contextual metadata

**Tail sampling** keeps cost sane by retaining events by priority: 100% of errors, 100% of slow requests (p99+), all VIP/enterprise users, and a 1–5% random sample of healthy requests.

The payoff: debugging shifts from archaeological text-searching to analytics-style queries over structured business events.

Boris is building [nominal.dev](https://nominal.dev), an observability platform based on this idea.

## How I actually use this

My usual move: send this article to an LLM agent and have it build me an [Effect](https://effect.website/) layer for logging and observability from it — since most of my code is Effect anyway. I specify the sampling strategy up front: on small projects I sample at 100% (no sampling — I want all the data), and as the project grows I start dialing in tail sampling along the lines Boris describes.

---

## Links

- Directory entry: https://andrey-markin.com/directory/logging-sucks
- All directory entries: https://andrey-markin.com/directory
- Contact: https://andrey-markin.com/#contact