[shanemhansen]

To me traces (or maybe more specifically spans) are essentially a structured log with a unique ID and a reference to a parent ID.

Very open to have someone explain why I'm wrong or why they should be handled separately.

[kiitos]

Traces have a very specific data model, and corresponding limitations, which don't really accommodate log events/messages of arbitrary size. The access model for traces is also fundamentally different vs. that of logs.

[phillipcarter]

There are practical limitations mostly with backend analysis tools. OTel does not define a limit on how large a span is. It’s quite common in LLM Observability to capture full prompts and LLM responses as attributes on spans, for example.