I'm planning on adding some more metadata to the process execution workunit if anyone as any feedback https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/issues/22203 This is to make inspecting the intermediate process outputs easier (as you fetch the digest from the remote cache if you know the fingerprint)

By a "custom workunit logger" do you mean an alternative to https://www.pantsbuild.org/stable/reference/subsystems/workunit-logger or something on the bazel-remote side? Adding more metadata may require rethinking a bit the json logger works (maybe ignoring some known to be un json-serialiable fields by default?) <https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/22186> But overall "What would turn this cache miss into a hit?" is what I would most like to be able to answer

It's a custom pants plugin (to produce otel traces)

ah, we post process the json

workunit-logger

to otel

I've got a first pass at this working if you want to look it over https://github.com/pantsbuild/pants/pull/22212