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Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

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Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#41

Post by DharmaPolice »

bonoboTP wrote: post #30
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #7

All software should provide something meaningful for anybody to diagnose, if they’re inclined to. It’s particularly bad in the (Apple) mobile ecosystem, including AppleTV. I have AdGuard Home but one of my spouse’s streaming services wouldn’t work. “There was a problem.” Gee thanks. Eventually figured out that I had to unblock a few hosts so it would work. Only found which ones by googling and finding some other poor…

They don't want tinkering or tinkerers. Apple is all about walled-off, locked-down, black box, just-works (when it does) etc. It's supposed to seem like magic. You're not supposed to tinker with magic, it makes it pedestrian. Apple as a brand is a lifestyle, a feeling. The slick, polished brand. Remember "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC"? PC is where you tinker, and there is screws and nuts and bolts and jargon and troublesh…

I totally agree but you can attribute a lot of the Apple worship to Microsoft and their OEM partners making PC laptops an often miserable experience.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#42

Post by alpaca128 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #30
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #7

All software should provide something meaningful for anybody to diagnose, if they’re inclined to. It’s particularly bad in the (Apple) mobile ecosystem, including AppleTV. I have AdGuard Home but one of my spouse’s streaming services wouldn’t work. “There was a problem.” Gee thanks. Eventually figured out that I had to unblock a few hosts so it would work. Only found which ones by googling and finding some other poor…

They don't want tinkering or tinkerers. Apple is all about walled-off, locked-down, black box, just-works (when it does) etc. It's supposed to seem like magic. You're not supposed to tinker with magic, it makes it pedestrian. Apple as a brand is a lifestyle, a feeling. The slick, polished brand. Remember "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC"? PC is where you tinker, and there is screws and nuts and bolts and jargon and troublesh…

There's a difference between Apple's mobile devices which are an actual walled garden, and Mac OS which (begrudgingly) still lets you install and run pretty much anything. It has a nice terminal, no driver issues, and is not nearly as distracting and annoying as modern Windows (still has more than enough bugs and quirks though). And once update support runs out I can install Linux on it.

iPads are a completely different world and really feel not just restrictive but the whole ecosystem constantly tries to push you towards subscriptions for everything, including the OS which conveniently offers the only sane backup solution that can cover all apps. It incentivises content consumption and giving up control over one's data. Not my cup of tea.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#43

Post by RadiozRadioz »

mfuzzey wrote: post #14

Depends a lot on the context and type of software. For server side software where there is a sysadmin in charge of keeping it running I generally agree. But for end user software (desktop, mobile, embedded) no one wil read the logs and there the logs can, and probably should, be aimed at the developers. Of course you can and should still provide usable and informative end user oriented error messages but they're not…

A small subset of technical users do read logs. If a desktop app has a problem, I have a fighting chance of fixing it if I have logs. Error messages may not give the full picture; what was the app trying to do before the error occurred? Logs let me debug slowness and crashes.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#44

Post by justinclift »

nubinetwork wrote: post #36

I recently went all-in on the systemd ecosystem as much as I could on some recent hardware installs, and my biggest pet peeve is the double timestamps and double logs I find in journalctl... it's like they never intended you to read the logs...

One fairly common approach to this for systems, is to configure the system to ship the logs to an external collection mechanism (FluentBit, etc) and do so in JSON format.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#45

Post by justinclift »

superjan wrote: post #27
lucianbr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the impression that often it isn't laziness but the concept that error details leak information to an attacker and are therefore a vulnerability. I disagree with this view, but it definitely exists.

Yeah, along those lines we have requirements on never logging PII, and not logging anything that potentially contains PII, such as folder names.

Maybe tokenise the PII part of the folder name when outputting it?

ie `$HOME`/.config/foo/stuff.cfg` rather than `/home/joebloggs/foo/stuff.cfg`?

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#46

Post by bsder »

bonoboTP wrote: post #30
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #7

All software should provide something meaningful for anybody to diagnose, if they’re inclined to. It’s particularly bad in the (Apple) mobile ecosystem, including AppleTV. I have AdGuard Home but one of my spouse’s streaming services wouldn’t work. “There was a problem.” Gee thanks. Eventually figured out that I had to unblock a few hosts so it would work. Only found which ones by googling and finding some other poor…

They don't want tinkering or tinkerers. Apple is all about walled-off, locked-down, black box, just-works (when it does) etc. It's supposed to seem like magic. You're not supposed to tinker with magic, it makes it pedestrian. Apple as a brand is a lifestyle, a feeling. The slick, polished brand. Remember "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC"? PC is where you tinker, and there is screws and nuts and bolts and jargon and troublesh…

> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US.

Linux, historically, was terrible and then some; lots of us simply want to get on with life and not dork with the OS every day. If you didn't want to use Windows at your day job, that left OS X.

And, for a while, Apple hardware was quite nice. For a remarkably long time, you could get way cheaper high resolution laptop displays than the competition. The trackpads have always been far superior on Apple than Linux. And then the M-series came along and was also quite nice.

However, over time Linux has gotten better so it's now functional as a daily driver and reasonably reliable. And macOS has deteriorated until it's now probably below Linux in terms of reliability.

So, here we are. macOS and Windows do seem to be losing share to Linux, but only Linux cares. At this point, desktop/laptop revenue is dwarfed by everything else at both Microsoft and Apple.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#47

Post by Terr_ »

justinclift wrote: post #45
superjan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, along those lines we have requirements on never logging PII, and not logging anything that potentially contains PII, such as folder names.

Maybe tokenise the PII part of the folder name when outputting it? ie `$HOME`/.config/foo/stuff.cfg` rather than `/home/joebloggs/foo/stuff.cfg`?

Or have an encrypted data portion, so that the sensitive details can be revealed as-needed, and redaction occurs by rotating a key.

Obviously that depends on the messages being infrequent in production logging levels.

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#48

Post by foresto »

Rather than indulging the inevitable argument that most users never read log messages, I hope we can remember a more important fact:

Some users do read log messages, just as some users file useful bug reports. Even when they are a tiny minority, I find their discoveries valuable. They give me a view into problems that my software faces out there in the wilds of real-world use. My log messages enable those discoveries, and have led to improvements not only in my own code, but also in other people's projects that affect mine.

This is part of why I include a logging system and (hopefully) understandable messages in my software. Even standalone tools and GUI applications.

(And since I am among the minority who read log messages, I appreciate good ones in software made by other people. Especially when they allow me to solve a problem immediately, on my own, rather than waiting days or weeks get the developer's attention.)

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#49

Post by xahrepap »

hinkley wrote: post #38

For years now I’ve been pushing for moving of all non actionable error messages and all aggregate-actionable error messages into telemetry data instead. Not the least of which because log processing SaaS companies seem to be overcharging for their services even versus hosted Grafana services, and really many of us could do away with the rent seeking entirely. The computational complexity of finding meaning in log fil…

Honest question, how do you handle high cardinality data points?

Reference to where my brain is at: https://www.robustperception.io/cardinality-is-key/

I feel like splunk’s business model favors a healthy system and gives major disadvantages to an unhealthy one. What I mean in an example: when the system is unhealthy, I know it because all my splunk queries get queued up because everyone is slamming it with queries. I hate it.

But I’m stuck in knowing how to move some things to Prometheus. Like say we have a CustomerID and we want to track number of times something is done by user. If we have thousands of customers, cardinality breaks that solution.

Is there a good solution for this?

Re: Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

#50

Post by xahrepap »

xahrepap wrote: post #49
hinkley wrote: post #38

For years now I’ve been pushing for moving of all non actionable error messages and all aggregate-actionable error messages into telemetry data instead. Not the least of which because log processing SaaS companies seem to be overcharging for their services even versus hosted Grafana services, and really many of us could do away with the rent seeking entirely. The computational complexity of finding meaning in log fil…

Honest question, how do you handle high cardinality data points? Reference to where my brain is at: https://www.robustperception.io/cardinality-is-key/ I feel like splunk’s business model favors a healthy system and gives major disadvantages to an unhealthy one. What I mean in an example: when the system is unhealthy, I know it because all my splunk queries get queued up because everyone is slamming it with queries.…

Asking this question got me to stop being lazy and actually try to answer my own question. Mimir being one that caught my eye

https://grafana.com/oss/mimir/

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