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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

now this is a spin i havent heard before.

As a sysadmin I really wish you had. SO MANY problems have come to my desk because some dude 3 years ago did not consider retention or rotation and now I have to figure out what to do with a 4TB .txt that is apparently important.

"You never know when you might need this info to debug" The developer says as their cronjob creates a 250MB csv file, and a few MB of debug logs per day, for the past few years. "Disk is cheap" they say.

As a sysadmin, I hate that too.

sometimes the data is just big...

Often a considerable portion of those logs are useless, trace level misclassified as info, kept for years for no reason.

You should keep a minimal set of logs necessary for audit, logs for errors which are actually errors, and logs for things which happen unexpectedly.

What people do keep are logs for everything which happens, almost all of which is never a surprise.

One needs to go through logs periodically and purge the logging code for every kind of message which doesn’t spark joy, I mean seem like it would ever be useful to know.

sure, in a world where machine learning doesnt exist i would agree with you. for low level logs of things like "memory low, spawning a new container" i would also agree with you. not for user actions though (which is the topic closest to whats under discussion given what sort of data these regulations cover)

Find out how important it is with a `mv 4TB.txt 4TB.old` type of things. See how many people come screaming

Have you come up with a process, or an idea for a process to ensure this doesn't happen?

For instance when they create a provisioning request, are you able to set an extremely low threshold? When they say that won't do, the cost increases and their able to see/understand and start to care about the actual lifecycles of what they're creating?

Surely there is a way to project and monitor the cost of their resources over time, and deliver them an invoice on a regular basis? In other words something like a cost attribution model? That way when the bills start to increase dramatically overtime, pinpointing the heavy hitters becomes trivial, and when they come knocking on your door to "do something about it" you can just say "go talk to Bob".

I don't mean to sound like I'm trivializing the problem (honestly I can relate as I've gone through it myself), but I'd love to hear how anyone else has dealt with this issue effectively.

It comes down to monitoring, alerting, and followup. In other words, "good ops", which is lacking almost everywhere. Unfortunately that is always a moving target, with added complexity being that we're an external service provider and have limited authority in the client environment. Also, the sorts of companies that outsource their ops will also be willing to change providers multiple times, so it's often like trying to live in a library that has seen many generations of librarians each with their own ideas for how things ought to be organized.

You haven't heard it because it's not spin, it's from an engineer's point of view. That's not the view you hear in the news when it comes to these things.

Eh, Retention and Deletion are both pain for devs. Not having to care is the happy state.

HN seems like an odd place to assume that people only hear about things from the news and aren't engineers themselves.

i am a dev that has to deal with these regulations in my day to day. it is a pain, it is not freeing in any sense, and it makes my models worse.

granted, i think there are good reasons for it, but it does not make my life easier for sure.

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