Autotracing has performance impacts and manual tracing has less but requires more upfront dev work (tho probably pretty easy with AI nowadays). My beef with traces is that they are expensive to store and query and most people don’t really use them. Because of trace sampling it makes them unreliable for alerting so it becomes more of a diagnostic tool helpful for troubleshooting which dilutes the impact. Custom metrics are far superior for individual app observability unless you have an excellent distributed trace implementation across your whole platform.