diff --git a/pageserver/src/tenant.rs b/pageserver/src/tenant.rs
index 6a748f61e7e1..76dc52fa16b9 100644
--- a/pageserver/src/tenant.rs
+++ b/pageserver/src/tenant.rs
@@ -2151,6 +2151,7 @@ impl Tenant {
             // Upload an index from the parent: this is partly to provide freshness for the
             // child tenants that will copy it, and partly for general ease-of-debugging: there will
             // always be a parent shard index in the same generation as we wrote the child shard index.
+            tracing::info!(timeline_id=%timeline.timeline_id, "Uploading index");
             timeline
                 .remote_client
                 .schedule_index_upload_for_file_changes()?;
@@ -2158,12 +2159,14 @@ impl Tenant {
 
             // Shut down the timeline's remote client: this means that the indices we write
             // for child shards will not be invalidated by the parent shard deleting layers.
+            tracing::info!(timeline_id=%timeline.timeline_id, "Shutting down remote storage client");
             timeline.remote_client.shutdown().await;
 
             // Download methods can still be used after shutdown, as they don't flow through the remote client's
             // queue.  In principal the RemoteTimelineClient could provide this without downloading it, but this
             // operation is rare, so it's simpler to just download it (and robustly guarantees that the index
             // we use here really is the remotely persistent one).
+            tracing::info!(timeline_id=%timeline.timeline_id, "Downloading index_part from parent");
             let result = timeline.remote_client
                 .download_index_file(&self.cancel)
                 .instrument(info_span!("download_index_file", tenant_id=%self.tenant_shard_id.tenant_id, shard_id=%self.tenant_shard_id.shard_slug(), timeline_id=%timeline.timeline_id))
@@ -2176,6 +2179,7 @@ impl Tenant {
             };
 
             for child_shard in child_shards {
+                tracing::info!(timeline_id=%timeline.timeline_id, "Uploading index_part for child {}", child_shard.to_index());
                 upload_index_part(
                     &self.remote_storage,
                     child_shard,
diff --git a/pageserver/src/tenant/mgr.rs b/pageserver/src/tenant/mgr.rs
index 4fcdf1405288..1bc21d8b7805 100644
--- a/pageserver/src/tenant/mgr.rs
+++ b/pageserver/src/tenant/mgr.rs
@@ -1715,6 +1715,7 @@ impl TenantManager {
             let timelines = parent_shard.timelines.lock().unwrap().clone();
             let parent_timelines = timelines.keys().cloned().collect::<Vec<_>>();
             for timeline in timelines.values() {
+                tracing::info!(timeline_id=%timeline.timeline_id, "Loading list of layers to hardlink");
                 let timeline_layers = timeline
                     .layers
                     .read()
@@ -1754,7 +1755,12 @@ impl TenantManager {
 
         // Since we will do a large number of small filesystem metadata operations, batch them into
         // spawn_blocking calls rather than doing each one as a tokio::fs round-trip.
+        let span = tracing::Span::current();
         let jh = tokio::task::spawn_blocking(move || -> anyhow::Result<usize> {
+            // Run this synchronous code in the same log context as the outer function that spawned it.
+            let _span = span.enter();
+
+            tracing::info!("Creating {} directories", create_dirs.len());
             for dir in &create_dirs {
                 if let Err(e) = std::fs::create_dir_all(dir) {
                     // Ignore AlreadyExists errors, drop out on all other errors
@@ -1768,6 +1774,11 @@ impl TenantManager {
             }
 
             for child_prefix in child_prefixes {
+                tracing::info!(
+                    "Hard-linking {} parent layers into child path {}",
+                    parent_layers.len(),
+                    child_prefix
+                );
                 for relative_layer in &parent_layers {
                     let parent_path = parent_path.join(relative_layer);
                     let child_path = child_prefix.join(relative_layer);
@@ -1793,6 +1804,7 @@ impl TenantManager {
             // Durability is not required for correctness, but if we crashed during split and
             // then came restarted with empty timeline dirs, it would be very inefficient to
             // re-populate from remote storage.
+            tracing::info!("fsyncing {} directories", create_dirs.len());
             for dir in create_dirs {
                 if let Err(e) = crashsafe::fsync(&dir) {
                     // Something removed a newly created timeline dir out from underneath us?  Extremely