Compare logs, metrics, traces, events, profiles, and alerts by the questions they answer and the fields that connect them.
Choose the signal that can answer your next question. Metrics show the affected population, traces show recorded execution, and logs supply event details. Events, profiles, and alerts add different kinds of context. Their scopes and retention policies determine how reliably they can be joined.
Logs are timestamped records of discrete activity, carrying messages and structured fields for an investigation.
Metrics summarize numerical observations over time, such as request counts, latency distributions, and resource usage.
Traces describe recorded distributed operations as spans with execution relationships, duration, and attributes.
Events record discrete operational occurrences, such as restarts, configuration changes, failovers, and rollouts.
Profiles sample or measure resource use by code paths, such as CPU activity or allocated memory, over a defined interval.
Alerts are notifications that a monitored condition matched a rule or detector; they describe symptoms that need triage.