The APM paradox: Too much data, too few answers

Traditional APM tools overwhelm teams with dashboards and data while failing to answer critical questions during production incidents. The evolution from APM to observability introduced metrics, logs, and traces, but the real innovation came with wide events—structured logs that combine performance, business metrics, and debugging context in a single queryable format. Legacy APMs struggle to adapt because they were built to solve known performance problems, not unknown unknowns. Modern approaches focus on sending more useful data rather than storing everything, using structured logging and automatic instrumentation to provide flexibility without complexity or excessive costs.