CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#
smatter
smatter

Reputation: 29178

What should an Application Log ideally contain?

What kind of information should an Application Log ideally contain? How is it different from Error Log?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2507

Answers (5)

PeterAllenWebb
PeterAllenWebb

Reputation: 10408

Ideally, it should contain exactly the information you need to diagnose an application problem, or analyze a particular aspect of its past behavior. The only thing that makes this hard to do is that you do not know in advance exactly what problems will occur or which aspects of the application behavior will interest you in the future. You can't log every single change in application state, but you have to log enough. How much is enough? That's hard to say and very application-dependent. I doubt a desktop calculator logs anything.

An error log would just log any errors that occur. Unexpected exceptions and other unexpected conditions.

Upvotes: 2

Alistair Evans
Alistair Evans

Reputation: 36473

A true error log should really contain:

  • The stack trace of where the error took place
  • The local variables present at the point of error.
  • A timestamp of when the error took place.
  • Detail of the exception thrown (if it is an exception).

A general application log file, for tracking events, etc, should contain less internal information, and perhaps be more user friendly.

To be honest, the answer really depends on what software the log is for.

Upvotes: 2

Mark
Mark

Reputation: 1376

You are going to get a lot of different opinions for this question.....

Ultimately it should contain any information that you think is going to be relevant to your application. It should also contain information that will help you determine what is happening with the application. That is not to say it should contain errors, but could if you wanted to use it that way.

At a minimum I would suggest that you include:

  • application start/stop time
  • application name
  • pass/fail information (if applicable)

Optional items would be:

  • call processing (if not too intensive)
  • errors if you decide to combine application and error logs
  • messaging (if not too intensive)

One thing you want to keep in mind is that you do not want to be writing so much information to your logs that you impact your application performance. Also, want to make sure you don't grow your log files so large that you run out of disk space.

Upvotes: 3

Jeremy
Jeremy

Reputation: 6670

The application log should contain all the information necessary for audit. This may include such things as successful/unsuccessful log on and any specific actions. The error log can be a subset of the application log or a separate log containing only information related to errors in the application.

Upvotes: 1

schnaader
schnaader

Reputation: 49719

An application log usually contains errors, warning, events and non-critical information in difference to an error log that usually contains only errors and critical warnings.

Upvotes: 1

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