Yuna<p>Your logs are lying to you - metrics are meaner and better.</p><p>Everyone loves logs… until the incident postmortem reads like bad fan fiction.<br>Most teams start with expensive log aggregation, full-text searching their way into oblivion. So much noise. So little signal. And still, no clue what actually happened. Why? Because writing meaningful logs is a lost art. <br>Logs are like candles, nice for mood lighting, useless in a house fire.</p><p>If you need traces to understand your system, congratulations: you're already in hell.</p><p>Let me introduce my favourite method: real-time, metric-driven user simulation aka "Overwatch".</p><p>Here's how you do it:</p><p>🧪 Set up a service that runs real end-to-end user workflows 24/7. Use Cypress, Playwright, Selenium… your poison of choice.<br>📊 Every action creates a timed metric tagged with the user workflow and action.<br>🧠 Now you know exactly what a user did before everything went up in flames.</p><p>Use Grafana + InfluxDB (or other tools you already use) to build dashboards that actually tell stories:</p><p>* How fast are user workflows?<br>* Which steps are breaking, and how often?<br>* What's slower today than yesterday?<br>* Who's affected, and where?</p><p>🎯 Alerts now mean something.<br>🚨 Incidents become surgical strikes, not scavenger hunts.<br>⚙️ Bonus: run the same system on every test environment and detect regressions before deployment. And if you made it reusable, you can even run the service to do load tests.</p><p>No need to buy overpriced tools. Just build a small service like you already do, except this one might save your soul.</p><p>And yes, transform logs into metrics where possible. Just hash your PII data and move on.</p><p>Stop guessing. Start observing.<br>Metrics > Logs. Always.</p><p><a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Observability" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Observability</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/MetricsOverLogs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>MetricsOverLogs</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/DevOps" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DevOps</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/SRE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SRE</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/IncidentResponse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>IncidentResponse</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/RealUserMonitoring" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>RealUserMonitoring</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Telemetry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Telemetry</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Grafana" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Grafana</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/InfluxDB" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>InfluxDB</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Automation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Automation</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Cypress" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Cypress</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Playwright" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Playwright</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/Selenium" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Selenium</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/DashboardsThatMatter" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DashboardsThatMatter</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/BurnYourLogs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BurnYourLogs</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/MonitoringMadness" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>MonitoringMadness</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/SystemDesign" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SystemDesign</span></a> <a href="https://hachyderm.io/tags/PostmortemPoetry" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PostmortemPoetry</span></a></p>