Production-systems

How trace sampling affects production debugging, including head sampling, parent-based sampling, tail sampling trade-offs, error traces, rare paths, async work, and metrics that show whether sampling is hiding incidents.

Observability vs logging in production, with a practical guide to when logs, metrics, traces, and correlation IDs answer different debugging questions.

How to run background jobs safely in production with replay-safe handlers, bounded retries, dead-letter triage, visibility timeouts, queue dashboards, and business-level correctness checks.

Why request timeouts limit waiting but do not stop cascading failures unless they are paired with admission control, bounded queues, backpressure, and load shedding.

Why retry logic can amplify degraded systems, how retry budgets and jitter reduce retry storms, and what to check before retrying production requests.