Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by nottorp » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #78

nottorp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried late last year to set up a new linux server with the help of "AI". Unfortunately it couldn't decide what distribution it's talking about in spite of me specifying it in the prompt. And when it got it right it mixed LTS Ubuntu versions. So... i don't know about "AI". Might have to still write the config files by hand.

People have widely different experiences regarding this. All I can say is that Claude is working great for me for doing drudgery sysadmin stuff but I'm also somewhat experienced in these things and that helps in telling it specifically what I want. I think it depends on what model you tried, but also I know people are tired of being told that it's about the model or skill issue, so I'll just note that this is your ex…

Sysadmin as a day job I'm not. Being able to bring up a kernel on a rev 0 arm board doesn't make me an expert in apache configuration :)

And linux on the server works well enough that I decided to replace the home box only after like 10 years, so I'm not even sure what services I need to migrate, and the safe option is to start from a clean slate and redo all the configuration from scratch.

Probably don't remember what questions to ask. Or if i should dump apache and install nginx instead.

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

#82

Post by mixmastamyk » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 11:50 PM UTC

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #80

mixmastamyk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple sends tens of megabytes of telemetry from first network connection and regularly: https://sneak.berlin/20210202/macos-11.2-network-privacy/ None of this able to be turned off, the boot volume is read-only. Can only be deactivated by jumping through hoops.

Yeah, that stuff is not great by any means either. Still, it's not as bad as Windows's telemetry, and it's not OS-native advertising like Windows, and it can be substantially mitigated with firewall software (call it a bit of tinkering, if you will).

Other than obvious advertising, it is not proven that it is not as bad. Firewall software is often bypassed by design on macos/windows. Further, data is logged so even an external firewall is not foolproof, as the first time you connect to another wifi the data is sent.

It's almost as if they demand the data, and won't be denied it.

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

#83

Post by vlovich123 » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #68

vlovich123 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uptic…

But most requests don't generate errors / warnings / failures, so you can easily discard most of the logs for those that don't.

> there’s really no such thing as tracing a->b->c anyway

> 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.

Except as you note you can have a tag to correlate logs across distributed services. This is already done for jaeger tracing. It would be insanity to try to look at all logs at once. When you're looking at logs it's because something like "customer A complains they had a problem with request XYZ". And honestly, 8k/s is child's play for logging. A system I was running had to start tuning down the log verbosity at ~30k requests/s and that's because it was generating like 8 logs per request (so ~100k logs/s).

> 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

That's between you and your log ingestion system. You get to pick where you send your logs and the capabilities it has. All the companies I worked at self-hosted their log infrastructure and it worked fine for not a lot of money. You're conflating best practices with "what can I pay a SaaS company to solve for me". Honeycomb.io may be helpful here btw. Their pricing wasn't exorbitantly egregious here and at low to medium scale tracing the way they do it can supplant the need for logging.