Do You Use Logging?

Question

It seems that with advent of technologies for capturing errors with breadcrumbs there is a diminished need for ever reading error logs.I am talking about sifting through large log files looking for clues as to what happened.If you do, I would be curious to know what's your use case?

ungawatkt · Accepted Answer

Logging isn't only error catching (though I do use it for that). Logging also gets you metrics, access info, timing info, etc. You can get a lot of insights out of the http access logs of a server, even without having errors.

jiehong · Answer

Good structured logs help you understand what happens, even if you don’t necessarily get an error per say.
My use case is distributed backend traffic written in many different languages, none of them supported by Sentry breadcrumbs (I think that’s what you meant).
In another context, I’ve seen logs for some internet providers log where they branch off according to their spec: you could read the logs as an actual tree of decisions taken by the program and compare it with the spec.
Sometimes, if someone asks me what a program does, I’d say "it logs, mainly, and produces a http response too".

chadaustin · Answer

Every day. I spent most of my time since April sifting through production logs to track down a bug between FSEvents and Watchman that produced incorrect query results. Despite much effort, I was never able to reproduce locally. Logs, ring buffers, and remote event recording are invaluable.

thesuperbigfrog · Answer

>> "capturing errors with breadcrumbs"Forgive my ignorance, but what is this?How would I set up my server that handles API requests to use it?

yuppie_scum · Answer

Is this a phish for log4j users?

mbfg · Answer

i think a better question (seriously) is who doesn't use logs.

Do You Use Logging?

It seems that with advent of technologies for capturing errors with breadcrumbs there is a diminished need for ever reading error logs.
I am talking about sifting through large log files looking for clues as to what happened.
If you do, I would be curious to know what's your use case?

Logging isn't only error catching (though I do use it for that). Logging also gets you metrics, access info, timing info, etc. You can get a lot of insights out of the http access logs of a server, even without having errors.

Every day. I spent most of my time since April sifting through production logs to track down a bug between FSEvents and Watchman that produced incorrect query results. Despite much effort, I was never able to reproduce locally. Logs, ring buffers, and remote event recording are invaluable.

>> "capturing errors with breadcrumbs"
Forgive my ignorance, but what is this?
How would I set up my server that handles API requests to use it?

Is this a phish for log4j users?

i think a better question (seriously) is who doesn't use logs.