Historically, logs have been essential for troubleshooting application and infrastructure performance. Nowadays, it is used for business dashboards vi

The Art of Logging. In order to get the most of the logs… | by Jaouher Kharrat | Sep, 2022 | Medium

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2022-10-02 11:00:18

Historically, logs have been essential for troubleshooting application and infrastructure performance. Nowadays, it is used for business dashboards visualization and performance analysis.

The importance of structuring the data in those log files so that it can be extracted, manipulated, and analyzed efficiently, in addition to being understandable by humans, is quickly moving up the priority list. The rise of (micro)services also gave birth to another challenge: tracing the propagation of the request throughout the system.

In this article, we will identify the optimal format for structuring our logs that is easy for humans and machines to parse and understand. Next, we will highlight the key info to log in addition to a proposal of data structure. Finally we will try to provide some important notes to keep in mind for your own projects.

Although logs are originally meant to be parsed, processed, and stored by machines, they are actively being read, understood, and diagnosed by humans. Logs are our best indicators to investigate the murder scene caused by our arch enemy: The Bug! 🐛