Matteo Collina’s Post

🤔 Is distributed tracing worth its overhead in Node.js? Every trace you capture changes your application's behavior. Every context you propagate costs performance. But when do the insights outweigh the cost? Adding observability is the Heisenberg observer effect in action: "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." 🔬 Your monitoring changes what you're monitoring. The question is: how much, and is it worth it? This Tuesday (August 13), we're hosting Bryan English to dive deep into what async context really enables, the real performance cost of distributed tracing, when observability overhead becomes a problem, and patterns that minimize the impact. Bryan has spent years building observability tools and knows exactly where async context shines and where it becomes a burden. From cross-service request flows to context propagation gotchas, he'll share hard-earned lessons from the trenches 💡 This discussion is perfect if you've ever struggled to trace requests across services, debugged mysterious memory leaks or spurious errors, wanted to understand traffic flow in high-volume apps, built observability tooling, or questioned if your tracing is worth the cost. This isn't theory, it's practical decision-making. When should you instrument? What's too much overhead? How do you balance visibility with performance? We'll tackle the real questions that impact your production systems 🌙 Observability doesn't have to be a black box decision between "all the traces" or "performance first." Join us to find the sweet spot for your applications 🚀 🗓️ Tuesday, August 13 🔗