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Comment by jasonhansel | Hacker News Reader

I must admit: I'm not a huge fan of structured logging, beyond simple use cases like tagging messages by the thread that produced them. If you want something machine-readable, use a dedicated metrics system, analytics database, or document store. If you want something human-readable, structured logging will only make things worse.

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I feel what is missing here is message templates [1] - the logging API should permit the key-value pairs to be substituted into a template which results in a human-readable message, while preserving the KV data separately. Take a hash of the template and add it as a KV pair so that messages of the same type can be easily filtered.

[1] https://messagetemplates.org

Loggers are just façade objects on Handlers, which is an interface.

It’s really designed to be a minimum necessary package to allow interop (via handlers) and a baseline of standalone usability (via loggers). The stdlib only provides a text and a json handler, not even a no-op handler which I think is sorely neededor a multi handler which I think would make a lot of sense.

But nothing precludes you publishing a messagetemplates handler, or whatever else you may want.

Structured logging is not meant for humans to read. It's meant for machines to read and represent in a human readable format. Additionally, these logs can _later_ be streamed into a metrics system, analytics database, or a document store. Sort of in a plug & play fashion.

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