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Comment by kerblang | Hacker News Reader

> you’ll get overwhelmed by a million irrelevant messages because the log level is set to INFO

I know this happens, but I think it's because programmers are abusing INFO. In principle it's reserved for messages that are informative at a level sys admins and a few others can make sense of and use. Unfortunately abuse often leads to "We turned INFO off" making it much harder to diagnose things after the fact.

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I think there should be an counterpart to "log analysis" which is "logging strategies for your app". Which should be WHAT to log and WHEN.

Stuff like, if you are exposing an HTTP endpoint, you should log the request URL and the time it took to serve it. Or if you are invoking an extenral service, you should log the response time of that service.

And you should produce a single line of output for each request that identifies all of the pertinent information. You can have more than one, for e.g. a thread dump, but there should be one that provides a complete summary. I've lived with apps that logged at each stage of the process as separate lines, and that's just not useful data when grepping for anomalies.

I hypothesize it's not useful because you're using grep. If you use a tool that can show you multiple lines all tied by a request ID, it becomes much more helpful.

I am quite often looking for patterns across thousands of requests. As an example, one thing I inherited didn’t even log how long each request took to serve. Sure, you find out how long a single request took, by comparing the first and last log entry, but that’s just not useful 99% of the time.

This is exactly the kind of lack of logging info that exasperates any on call person.

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