Skip to content

Comment on Log by time, not by countparent

Comments

I worked at a place that banned logging levels. Everything sent to to the "log" function gets written to the logs, period. And then the rest was left to the services' maintainers to figure out.

That, combined with a real, genuine devops scheme where the people implementing the system and the people keeping it running in production where on the same team and generally the same actual people, seemed to produce some of the most excellent and usable logging I've ever seen. Without needing a whole bunch of rules to try and force everyone to (still fail to) get there.

One neat thing that I think really facilitated this was the sense of empowerment that came with having exactly one rule (logging isn't configurable) combined with one goal (keep the system up). We did decide we wanted smart logging along those lines. And we did see that existing solutions didn't support this very well. So someone wrote one. And it was so dead simple, and easy to use. The 'user manual' for new hires was basically, "Here's 50 lines of code that you should read."

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.