Guides
Why logs alone don’t solve incident correlation
Logs record what a component emitted; they do not, by themselves, stitch cross-app causality. Correlation is a join problem: shared identifiers, scope, and operator-grade deduplication—not grep.
Where logs still win
Post-incident forensics: stack traces, field-level attributes, and deep queries once you already know which subsystem to blame.
Why correlation fails in multi-app outages
Volume and variance
High cardinality and heterogeneous schemas mean “search until lucky” scales poorly—especially when multiple teams each have a “canonical” trace format.
Missing joins
Async handoffs and retries split one logical failure across log streams. Without stable correlation keys, humans become the join engine—under SLA pressure.
What a control plane adds (without replacing logs)
Normalized ingest, explicit validation outcomes, and dedupe semantics so the same retry does not become three incidents. Logs remain the drill-down; the control plane carries the operator narrative.
Related: How ingest and correlation work.
Next steps
Move from reading to evaluation: see authenticated surfaces, redacted walkthroughs, or the operator capability map.