CODEWITHSUNDEEP
logging
Dr. Xray
Dr. Xray

Reputation: 928

Best practices for logging on top of logging levels

Generally, log levels can be switched to get different level of detailed logs. Usually a lowest level of log often can help one to identify which area of the codes could be wrong. To further debug, one usually increases the debug level to get more information. However, this results in unnecessary large amount of logs that is not related to the problem.

The quest is: what are the best practices on this issue? define another dimension of logs? By logic area, methods or else?

EDIT: This comes from a real project where the application deployed on customer environment and when things go wrong, the log is the thing they send in for debugging, definitely they will hate sending large amount of logs, or do the analysis/parsing themselves: usually they are non-technical customers. I guess this is related to the question of how to manager the logging efficiency in this situation. Please leave comment if opening another thread is more proper. Thanks.

Upvotes: 7

Views: 1603

Answers (3)

Glenn
Glenn

Reputation: 8032

You already mentioned logging by level. Here are the logging levels provided by the java.util.logging package which are very effective for controlling the volume of log messages based on need (trending vs debugging).

Another dimension to logging is to log by events and to categorise those events into some kind of fairly shallow hierarchy. Check out this article on logging for the purposes of analysis for more information such as using Scribe and Hadoop.

Upvotes: 0

Mike Valenty
Mike Valenty

Reputation: 8981

If you have massive amounts of logs, you could separate them by functional area, this is what NHibernate does using log4net. Example:

NHiberate (root)
NHibernate.Loader
NHibernate.Cache
NHiberante.SQL
...

Also with a good library like log4j/net you can use a rolling log file appender which you can easily configure to not fill up your hard drive. For example, you can configure it to generate a log file up 10MB, then roll to another file up to 10 times and then go back the to first file and overwrite it.

Upvotes: 2

slugster
slugster

Reputation: 49984

You could use different listeners for different parts of your application. But probably the best thing you could use is the Microsoft Log Parser which gives you the ability to run queries over your log file, e.g. you can do a SELECT on the data within a text log file. Check it out, it really is quite a powerful tool.

Upvotes: 3

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