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A Practitioner's Guide to Wide Events

The existing articles on Wide Events define the concept well but leave the implementation details to the reader.

Honeycomb, New Relic, and DataDog built their own columnar OLAP data stores, though now with the availability of ClickHouse, InfluxDB IOx, Apache Pinot, and DuckDB there are new Observability tools popping up all the time. AttributeExamplesDescription maintrue Present only for spans designated as a “wide event”, usually wrapping a request / response, or a background jobThis convention allows you to quickly figure out “what does the traffic to this service look like?” with a single query: Putting that information on a single span makes it easier to query and also helps with tools like Honeycomb’s BubbleUp which can then immediately tell you that that group of requests was slow because authentication took 10 seconds for some reason.

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