Not sure the descriptions are ideal here, but the 4 levels selected are completely adequate for most purposes in business information systems. If someone really

Not sure the descriptions are ideal here, but the 4 levels selected are completely adequate for most purposes in business information systems. If someone really wanted, you could cut it down to INFO & ERROR - I secretly think of DEBUG & WARN as tolerable fluff that keeps fussy people satisfied that things are complicated enough without making a mess. Per the article's concerns, no, I would not try to use this for auditing, metrics, or anything like that - just as a tool for devs to find out "OK what the heck is going on here?" I just collect all my logs on a big, fast file server where I can grep the crap out of them, with way more success than I've ever had with Fancy Stack Of Whiz Bang Thingies W/ Web Interface, although I'm always willing to watch someone attempt another Fancy Stack Fail... I recommend pressuring devs to make log messages coherent with good spelling and grammar - like anything else, it's "Write to be read," i.e. treat your reader with some respect, it's not that hard. Logs often end up thrown in the trash by sysadmins because they look like trash. It's especially hard to convince them that the logs are good enough that they can diagnose problems themselves instead of covering their eyes and asking me to look at the logs for them, and I don't entirely blame them.