Ask HN: Do You Use Logging?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29524846

by gajus • 5 years ago

7 8 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

yuppie_scum• 5 years ago

Is this a phish for log4j users?

vulcan01• 5 years ago

I don't think we need to be this cynical - this could simply be someone who saw the log4j news and was wondering why people use logging nowadays.

Which is, incidentally, a question that I also have.

gajus• 5 years ago

Coincidence, or maybe subconscious. Didn't even notice the log4j before posting this.

chadaustin• 5 years ago

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.

ungawatkt• 5 years ago

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.

mbfg• 5 years ago

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

thesuperbigfrog• 5 years ago

> "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?

jiehong• 5 years ago

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".

Ask HN: Do You Use Logging?

Related Stories