Use metrics for operational charts, but keep a separate, deliberately small event trail for incident reconstruction. TL;DR: a counter can tell a healthtech team that appointment confirmations dropped; it cannot reliably establish which workflow version ran, what outcome occurred, or which internal correlation key joins the steps. Trying to make one telemetry stream do both jobs either destroys useful context or turns every chart query into a log scan.

The deciding constraint is signal quality versus noise. A small team needs fast KPI time series, yet an incident review needs enough evidence to follow one customer interaction without copying health data into telemetry. Those needs overlap. They are not identical.

Should a feature metrics dashboard backend use an API or logs?

A dashboard question is aggregate: how many scheduling attempts succeeded per five-minute bucket, by workflow version?…