This presentation will demonstrate simplified versions of some classic distributed systems problems and how they can be debugged using structured logging and observability. The demonstrations are based on a real distributed system with real bugs.

Structured logging has been around for a while now, but it’s rarely implemented and often poorly understood. This presentation is designed to show that getting started with structured logging is easy and how terrifically helpful it is when things go wrong. Many professional software developers are implementing systems that write text logs to local files, but there is a much better way, and it is not hard.