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Sentry Instrumentation Guide: When to Reach for What

Errors, traces, logs, and metrics are the four kinds of telemetry most apps run on, and they overlap enough that the choice is rarely obvious. You can stuff context into a span attribute instead of logging it. You can count log lines instead of emitting a metric. You can add a duration to a log and call it a span.

But each signal exists because it answers a different question and feeds a different workflow once it lands. Reaching for the wrong one means the data is technically there but useless for the job you actually have later. This skill is the decision framework: given a value or an event in front of you, which signal should carry it, and why.

It decides what to emit. For how to turn each pillar on for a given stack, hand off to the sentry-*-sdk skills and sentry-setup-ai-monitoring.

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