Hacker News Reader

Comment by trotter_cashion | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback. I'm with you on the milliseconds and threads bits. As for hostname / version... how are you getting those into your logs? I've found having version in the logs very useful (and wished I had it when it wasn't there).

View on HN

Couldn't you output the host and version at the beginning of the log? Any tool that transforms the logs (splicing together logs from different servers) should include these bits in it's output.

Also, why don't you use a sortable form for time? (With the most significant parts first.)

My issue with host and version at the beginning of the log is that they'll roll away when your logs rotate. If you've got a service that's rarely taken down, anything written to the front of the logs is likely long gone by the time you have a problem. That said, there may be a better way to handle these two. I certainly don't like repeating information if it's not necessary.

> I certainly don't like repeating information if it's not necessary.

On what grounds?

You could just print the version, etc. again when logrotate sends your daemon a SIGHUP.

Ahh... never thought of doing that. I like it.

I don't think outputting the version is overkill at all. It's much easier and simpler to deal with it this way. Probably the nanosecond business is very much overkill, that only matters for a smaller subset of problem domains.

Whether the version is overkill depends on the frequency of version changes. If you're doing careful corporate releases with staging and QA on a two-month basis, it's definitely overkill - if you're doing continuous deployment with several releases daily and different systems running different versions concurrently, it's probably valuable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com