1 year ago

In a perfect world, developers would spend all their time writing creative, valuable code that contributes to meaningful software. Chief among these is application instrumentation — those aspects of an application that monitor or measure its performance (most commonly logs, but also metrics and traces).

Dynamic instrumentation allows developers to add instrumentation “dynamically” at runtime — when the application is running — which has substantial potential to remedy many of the limits of static instrumentation. This article will explore the limits of static instrumentation through the example of static logging, before exploring how dynamic instrumentation in production systems can reduce complexity, increase productivity and reduce the spiraling costs of static instrumentation.

If the code being logged is good, then writing those logs and redeploying the application will have proven a significant waste of time.