GoKawiilPublished Mar 16, 2026
Most logging is too narrow.
One line has the route. Another has the user. Another has the timeout. Another has the feature flag. Another has the deploy SHA.
Then an incident happens and you end up doing joins by hand.
Stripe’s answer is canonical log lines. The modern name is usually wide events. The pattern is simple: emit one structured record per unit of work with all the important fields already attached.
For a web service, that usually means one log event at the end of every request.
The Pattern
A canonical log line is the summary row for a request.
It should include the fields you always wish you had in one place:
route
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