Logging sucks
loggingsucks.com
Logging sucks
1–10 of 232 posts
Re: Logging sucks
#2Good write up.
Gonna go on a tangent here. Why the single purpose domain? Especially since the author has a blog. My blog is full of links to single post domains that are no longer.
Re: Logging sucks
#3I see more and more blog posts that contain interactive elements. Despite the general enshittification of the average blog and the internet, this feels like a 'modern' touch that actually adds something valuable to the sufficient ad-free no-popups old blog style.
Re: Logging sucks
#4A post on this topic feels incomplete without a shout-out to Charity Majors - she has been preaching this for a decade, branded the term "wide events" and "observability", and built honeycomb.io around this concept.
Also worth pointing out that you can implement this method with a lot of tools these days. Both structured Logs or Traces lend itself to capture wide events. Just make sure to use a tool that supports general query patterns and has rich visualizations (time-series, histograms).
Re: Logging sucks
#5> Logs were designed for a different era. An era of monoliths, single servers, and problems you could reproduce locally. Today, a single user request might touch 15 services, 3 databases, 2 caches, and a message queue. Your logs are still acting like it's 2005.
If a user request is hitting that many things, in my view, that is a deeply broken architecture.
Re: Logging sucks
#6[dead]
Re: Logging sucks
#7Good write up. Gonna go on a tangent here. Why the single purpose domain? Especially since the author has a blog. My blog is full of links to single post domains that are no longer.
Because it's an ad
Re: Logging sucks
#8Good write up. Gonna go on a tangent here. Why the single purpose domain? Especially since the author has a blog. My blog is full of links to single post domains that are no longer.
Because it's an ad
it's an ad, for what?
i do not see a product upsell anywhere.
if it's an ad for the author themselves, then it's a very good one.
Re: Logging sucks
#9Tangential, but I wonder if the given example might be straying a step too far? Normally we want to keep sensitive data out of logs, but the example includes a user.lifetime_value_cents field. I'd want to have a chat with the rest of the business before sticking something like that in logs.
Re: Logging sucks
#10> Logs were designed for a different era. An era of monoliths, single servers, and problems you could reproduce locally. Today, a single user request might touch 15 services, 3 databases, 2 caches, and a message queue. Your logs are still acting like it's 2005.
Logs are fine. The job of local logs is to record the talk of a local process. They are doing this fine. Local logs were never meant to give you a picture of what's going on some other server. For such context, you need a transaction tracing that can stitch the story together across all processes involved.
Usually, looking at the logs at right place should lead you to the root cause.