Everything is events. The problem is that, as you notice, you frequently encounter situations where there are too many events to handle. Metrics, logging, and tracing are just three different ways to handle that problem.

Metrics handles too many events by aggregating them. You handle too many events by squashing them into a smaller number of events that aggregate the information.

Logging handles too many events by sampling them. If you have N times as many events as you can handle, take 1 in N of them or whatever other sampling model you want.

Tracing is logging, but where you have chains of correlated events. If you have a request started and a request ended event, it is pretty useless to get one without the other. So, you sample at the "chain of correlated events" level. You want 1 in N "chains of correlated events".

But, if you have enough throughput for all your events, just get yourself a big pile of events and throw it into a visualizer. Or better yet, just enable time travel debugging tracing so you do not need to even need to figure out how the events map to your program state.