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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

#61

Post by Spooky23 »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #55
bonoboTP wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're baffled because you appear to be uninformed and/or willfully ignorant. macOS is Unix-based and 90% functionally equivalent to Linux for software development and tinkering purposes. iOS, while less customizable than Android, is overall very good software for a phone. Apple hardware is superior across the board, especially for durability. Meanwhile, I'm baffled why any techie would voluntarily use an OS that for…

As someone who came up in the Slashdot M$ era, if nothing else the PR and communication style of Satya is a masterclass is delivering a message to the public. The dude presents like a Zen master. The message is baffling and the strategy is nonexistent, but people think there’s a new gentle Microsoft.

Somehow angry Europeans (at least in this thread) are running into the embrace of Windows as the defender of the tinkerers. Certainly not in n my bingo card.

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

#62

Post by Spooky23 »

keithnz wrote: post #31

From recent experience, I'm thinking logs need to be written for AI. Over the last few months, I've had a couple of issues where I took a bunch of logs from a bunch of interacting programs, pointed the AI at the logs and the source code and it's been really effective and finding the problems, often seeing patterns that would have been really hard for me to spot in all the noise.

We have a magic button in servicenow that lets the L1 agent kick off a job that pulls telemetry from a user device and do an overall health check of the device. That input identifies the issue like 80% of the time if it’s a device issue.

It either gets resolved quicker by the L2 guy or dispatched to the third party hardware fix it guy or sent to some speciality L3 team. Resolution time is down like 60%.

My next goal is to assess disk and battery health in laptops and proactively replace if they hit whatever threshold we can push the vendors to accept. That could eliminate something like 30% of device related issues, which has a super high value.

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

#63

Post by vlovich123 »

hinkley wrote: post #58
vlovich123 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle the problem that telemetry is generally incapable of capturing temporal context?

That is the $65k question and unfortunately I don't have a pat answer for that yet. I probably need to see more types of projects instead of more time on fewer projects which is where I'm at. But I can give you a partial picture. You're going to end up with multiple dashboards with duplicate charts on them because you're showing correlation between two charts via proximity. Especially charts that are in the same colu…

Yeah, but that still doesn’t let you see “event A happened before event B which led to C”. I’ve had significantly >> 1 bugs where having good logs lets me investigate and resolve the issue so quickly and easily whereas telemetry would have left you searching around forever.

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

#64

Post by alsetmusic »

bonoboTP wrote: post #34
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but then their stuff needs to be perfect as designed. Because the moment there's a bug, we're back to needing diagnostic tools.

There is a self-regulating loop that Apple users quickly learn not to "draw outside the lines" and just use the thing as designed and intended by Apple. If you use stuff like AdGuard, custom DNS etc, that's tinkerer tier stuff. A good Apple user either watches the ads or pays not to see them.

I haven’t seen a YouTube ad on my machine in years. I download all the videos that I watch and skip through the ads that content creators bake in. I control my dns and network to restrict what can get to my browser and other apps. I have a highly customized Bash environment (I see no reason to switch to zshell when I’ve got Homebrew).

But paint the nerds who like MacOS and the wonderful third-party app ecosystem of developers who care about fit and finish as a bunch of mindless rubes if it makes you feel better.

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

#65

Post by jtbaker »

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…

IDK, they were sending around stacks of Mac Studios to tinkerer youtubers messing with EXO clustering like @geerlingguy.

https://youtu.be/1iT9JeZYXcI?si=UMR0nfHAYbVq2tF1

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

#66

Post by jandrewrogers »

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.

I know exactly how this happened, I was there. It filled a gap for a practical desktop UNIX when none existed.

In the old days, there many flavors of proprietary UNIX, like Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, AIX, et al plus a few open source versions like FreeBSD and early Linux. The early Internet was a purely UNIX world (still mostly is) but UNIX was a fragmented market of dozens of marginally interoperable OS.

During the dotcom boom, Solaris on Sparc became the gold standard for large servers. These are very expensive machines and not particularly user friendly. If you were a dev in those days, you were either using some type of Sparc workstation or FreeBSD or Linux (which wasn’t very good in those days). You wanted your desktop environment to be UNIX-ish but the good + cheap options were limited. Linux became better on the server and started to displace FreeBSD there but was still very limited as a desktop OS. Linux was much worse than Windows NT on the desktop at the time but Windows NT wasn’t UNIX.

MacOS X came along and offered UNIX on the desktop with a far better experience than Linux (or any other UNIX) on the desktop, and much cheaper than a Solaris workstation. It filled a clear gap in the market, and so Silicon Valley moved from a mix of Solaris and Linux desktops for development to MacOS X desktops, which were better in almost every way for the average dev. It was UNIX and it ran normal business applications like Microsoft Office.

MacOS X was a weaker UNIX than many of the other UNIX OS but it offered a desktop that didn’t suck and it was cheap. For someone that had been using Linux or Solaris at the time, which many devs were, it was a massive upgrade.

MacOS still kind of sucks as a UNIX but that’s okay because we don’t use it as a server. Silicon Valley needed a competent UNIX desktop that didn’t cost a fortune and Apple delivered.

Apple is just a remote UNIX system for manipulating the other UNIX systems your code actually runs one.

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

#68

Post by hinkley »

vlovich123 wrote: post #63
hinkley wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the $65k question and unfortunately I don't have a pat answer for that yet. I probably need to see more types of projects instead of more time on fewer projects which is where I'm at. But I can give you a partial picture. You're going to end up with multiple dashboards with duplicate charts on them because you're showing correlation between two charts via proximity. Especially charts that are in the same colu…

Yeah, but that still doesn’t let you see “event A happened before event B which led to C”. I’ve had significantly >> 1 bugs where having good logs lets me investigate and resolve the issue so quickly and easily whereas telemetry would have left you searching around forever.

Here’s the thing though. When you’ve got 1000 req/s split across a couple dozen log files all being scanned in parallel there’s really no such thing as tracing a->b->c anyway. It’s the seashore and you’re looking for a specific shell.

You’ve got correlationids, and if your system isn’t reliably propagating those everywhere you absolutely have to fix that. But you’re going to use those once you already notice an uptick in a weird error you haven’t seen before, and it’s hard to see those when you’re generating 8k log entries per second that are 140-200 characters long and so you’re only seeing twenty of them at a time in Splunk.

You have some chatty frontend that’s firing off three requests at the same time and you’re going to struggle period. You’re going to be down to some janky log searches for that and you don’t need to be paying someone $$ every month to still have it rough.

We used to have QA people for this.

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

#69

Post by nottorp »

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. You do it to yourself by buying this stuff. It's for people who don't want to spend one second thinking about actual technical issues.

Why only the US? I'm in Europe and I've switched from Linux to Mac OS as my daily driver when I got tired of waiting for the mythical "linux on the desktop year".

Note that a good part of my career involves arm linuxes for industrial applications so I never actually stopped using linux if i was paid for it.

Mac OS is indeed becoming more and more annoying, but then so is desktop Ubuntu. And Windows is out of the question. I know firsthand, I have a contract for a windows application right now.

If Apple management continues to not take their dried frog pills as prescribed, I will eventually switch back to Linux, but for the desktop I'll probably have to check out some more niche distributions, or at least Debian.

And even then I'll probably keep the macbook pro and switch to Linux only on the desktop machines.

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

#70

Post by bonoboTP »

nottorp wrote: post #69
bonoboTP wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You do it to yourself by buying this stuff. It's for people who don't want to spend one second thinking about actual technical issues. Why only the US? I'm in Europe and I've switched from Linux to Mac OS as my daily driver when I got tired of waiting for the mythical "linux on the desktop year".…

Ubuntu may have issues, but at least the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish. This is effort but we are in a thread discussing the problem of opaque errors and the impossibility of troubleshooting. Yes troubleshooting is tinkering. It is effortful and nerdy and sweaty, not slick and effortless.
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