Logs are the core of the human-machine interface for software developers and operators. Historically, they are very much like caveman paintings. They were our first attempt to express and understand how our software was working. For several decades, logs were an island of calm in a rapidly changing technological ecosystem. Logs remained the same even as software services became web-based and grew in scale.

If you were to wake me up at 3 am and ask me how Rookout differs from logs (or other pillars of Observability, for that matter), my answer would have focused on the agile nature of live debugging. I would have explained that Non-Breaking Breakpoints empower you to decide in real-time what data you need. Traditionally, you would use whatever logs (or metrics and spans) happen to be in the code and work backward from there.