This sounds a lot like structured logging with a fresh coat of paint. Wide events are nice conceptual model, but if you’ve been doing structured logs seriously, especially with something like Loki or ELK stack, you’re already capturing rich context per event — including things like user info, request paths, even DB queries if needed.
I’ve been using Loki recently and really like the approach: it stores log data in object storage and supports on-the-fly processing and extraction. You can build alerts and dashboards off it without needing to pre-aggregate or force everything into a metrics pipeline.
The real friction in all of these systems is instrumentation. You still need to get that structured event data out of your app code in a consistent way, and that part is rarely seamless unless your runtime or framework does most of it for free. So while wide events are a clean unification model, the dev overhead to emit them with enough fidelity is still very real.
I’ve been using Loki recently and really like the approach: it stores log data in object storage and supports on-the-fly processing and extraction. You can build alerts and dashboards off it without needing to pre-aggregate or force everything into a metrics pipeline.
The real friction in all of these systems is instrumentation. You still need to get that structured event data out of your app code in a consistent way, and that part is rarely seamless unless your runtime or framework does most of it for free. So while wide events are a clean unification model, the dev overhead to emit them with enough fidelity is still very real.