when should you actually bother with caching? you know, when does it make sense to put that extra layer in place

hey everyone, ive been thinking a lot about caching lately, especially in microservice architectures. were seeing some performance bottlenecks and the immediate thought is 'add caching!' but is it always the right answer? what are the real trade-offs we need to consider beyond just faster read times? are there specific metrics or scenarios that make caching a clear win versus just adding complexity? curious to hear your experiences and when youve found caching to be essential versus when it might have been overkill.