8 ms·

Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software

118 points by todsacerdoti 8mo ago

Etheryte 7mo ago
While I see the point the author is trying to make, I'm not really sure I agree. Most users don't even read error messages, never mind logs. At best, logs are something they need for compliance, for most, the concept doesn't exist at all. I do agree that the logs should help you understand what went wrong and why, but in that regard the principle is the same for both sysadmins and developers and I don't really see the difference?
- hk__2 7mo ago
  > Most users don't even read error messages, never mind logs. Yes, see all the questions on StackOverflow with people posting their error message without reading it, like “I got an error that says ‘fail! please install package xyz!’, what should I do?!?”.
  - dexwiz 7mo ago
    That question is more likely how do I install, not what to install.
    - dylan604 7mo ago
      I think that's being very generous. If you've ever been in tech support, you'll be amazed at how often you'll be asked what to do when it tells me to do X. If they don't know how to do X, then they should be able to look up how to do X. If it's something like install 3rd party library, then that's not the first party's responsibility. Especially OSS for different arch/distros. They are all different. Look up the 3rd party's repo and figure it out. But no, it's contact support straight away.
      - dexwiz 7mo ago
        I've worked in tech support. I get that 25-50% of the cases appear to be "read the docs to me." But the majority of those is because docs are poorly written, are overwhelming for new users, or they don't understand them and won't admit that directly.
    - john_strinlai 7mo ago
      on friday i got 2 calls saying "my phone is no longer showing me my emails, please fix" when the error message they received was roughly "please reenter your password to continue using outlook". on wednesday i got a call saying "the CRM wont let me input this note, please fix" when the error message was "you have included an invalid character, '□' found in description. remove invalid characters and resubmit".
- butterbomb 7mo ago
  Oddly enough though, my journey into computers was greatly assisted by my curiosity at random log files that were being dumped to my desktop constantly.
- tempest_ 7mo ago
  Sysadmins needs logs that tell them what action they can do fix it. Developers need logs that tell them what a system is doing. Generally a sysadmin needs to know "is there an action I can do to correct this" where as a dev has the power to alter source code and thus needs to know what and where the system is doing things.
- EvanAnderson 7mo ago
  In my sysadmin work I curse every developer who makes me fire up strace, tcpdump, procmon, Wireshark, etc, because they couldn't be bothered to actually say what file couldn't be found, what TCP connection failed to be established. etc.
  - lucianbr 7mo ago
    I get the impression that often it isn't laziness but the concept that error details leak information to an attacker and are therefore a vulnerability. I disagree with this view, but it definitely exists.
    - superjan 7mo ago
      Yeah, along those lines we have requirements on never logging PII, and not logging anything that potentially contains PII, such as folder names.
      - justinclift 7mo ago
        Maybe tokenise the PII part of the folder name when outputting it? ie `$HOME`/.config/foo/stuff.cfg` rather than `/home/joebloggs/foo/stuff.cfg`?
        Terr_ 7mo ago
        Or have an encrypted data portion, so that the sensitive details can be revealed as-needed, and redaction occurs by rotating a key. Obviously that depends on the messages being infrequent in production logging levels.
    - EvanAnderson 7mo ago
      In a message returned by a server to a client I suppose it's defensible. For writing to syslog, event log, a log file, etc, it's not.
- PunchyHamster 7mo ago
  > Most users don't even read error messages, never mind logs. They don't need to. The log message is so helpdesk have something actionable, or so it can be copy pasted into google to find people with similar problem maybe having solution.
- ragall 7mo ago
  > but in that regard the principle is the same for both sysadmins and developers and I don't really see the difference? No, it's very different: developers generally want to know about things they control, so they want detailed debugging info about a program's internal state that could have caused a malfunction. Sysadmins don't care about that (they're fine with coalescing all the errors that developers care about under a general "internal error"), and they care about what in the program environment could have triggered the bug, so that they may entirely avoid it or at least deploy workarounds to sidestep the bug.
ignoramous 7mo ago
For a FOSS Android app I co-develop, we go out of our way to make verbose logging efficient to collect & easy to share (one-click copy). I've seen users get good mileage out of asking an LLM just what has gone wrong. We are adding more structure to log messages and add in as much state (like callstack) as possible with each log line, and diagnostics from procfs on resources held (like memory, threads, fds).
LgWoodenBadger 7mo ago
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 soul who fixed it and documented it.
- thayne 7mo ago
  > It’s particularly bad in the (Apple) mobile ecosystem It's been years since I've significantly used Apple software, but when I had to use a Mac at work, or helped friends or family troubleshoot some problem on Mac OS, I had a similar experience. When things don't "just work", it was very difficult to figure out why it didn't work.
- bonoboTP 7mo ago
  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 troubleshooting etc. In Apple land, you just take it to a slick genius bar and they do their magic. Or you just buy a new one. 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.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7mo ago
    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.
    - bonoboTP 7mo ago
naomi_kynes 7mo ago
[flagged]
jackfranklyn 7mo ago
[dead]
mfuzzey 7mo ago
Depends a lot on the context and type of software. For server side software where there is a sysadmin in charge of keeping it running I generally agree. But for end user software (desktop, mobile, embedded) no one wil read the logs and there the logs can, and probably should, be aimed at the developers. Of course you can and should still provide usable and informative end user oriented error messages but they're not the same thing as logs
- PunchyHamster 7mo ago
  It doesn't. The detailed log might be nonsense to the user but so is generic error, and the difference is that the specific log message makes it far easier to find solution than generic one. I.e. SEO-optimized
- ragall 7mo ago
  > But for end user software (desktop, mobile, embedded) no one wil [sic] read the logs Lots of end user software is used in an enterprise context where the helpdesk staff will have to read those logs. And for B2C (or retail, or amateur, whatever you want to call them) users, often they will go through online tutorials to try to self-diagnose because the developers are most of the time unreachable.
- RadiozRadioz 7mo ago
  A small subset of technical users do read logs. If a desktop app has a problem, I have a fighting chance of fixing it if I have logs. Error messages may not give the full picture; what was the app trying to do before the error occurred? Logs let me debug slowness and crashes.
majkinetor 7mo ago
Any group of people is target of specific log level. INFO for random folks, DEBUG for programmers etc.
- bbkane 7mo ago
  Yup, this is how I do it in https://github.com/bbkane/logos https://github.com/bbkane/logos
thangalin 7mo ago
Of possible interest: * https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/ * https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2026/02/03/lloopy-loops/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2026/02/03/lloopy-loops/ Both of these posts discuss using event-based frameworks to eliminate duplicative (cross-cutting) logging statements throughout a code base. My desktop Markdown editor[1], uses this approach to output log messages to a dialog box, a status bar, and standard error, effectively "for free". [1]: https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/keenwrite/tree/HEAD/src/main/java/com/keenwrite/events https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/keenwrite/tree/HEAD/src/main/j...
woeirua 7mo ago
I feel like this is an outdated point of view now. Logs are clearly going to be read primarily by agents very soon, if they're not already now. For example, we're experimenting with having Claude Desktop read log files for remote users. It's often able to troubleshoot and solve issues for our users faster than we can, especially after you give it access to your codebase through GH MCP or something like that. It's wild.
- gnoack 7mo ago
  How does this change the point that is being made in the article? Your agent is also only taking one of the existing roles that humans today occupy (e.g. the software operator or developer)
  - woeirua 7mo ago
    If the logs are being read by agents then they should be more detailed and verbose to help the agent understand the root cause. We reduce the volume of information for humans. That doesn’t need to be the case any longer.
justsomehnguy 7mo ago
> But if your software is successful (especially if it gets distributed to other people), most of the people running it won't be the developers, they'll only be operating it. The biggest problem is what when you wrote a code for a 'totally obvious message' you yourself was in the context. Years, year, heck even weeks later you would stare at it and wonder 'why tf I didn't wrote something more verbose?'. Anecdote: I wrote some supporting scripts to 'integrate' two systems three times - totally oblivious the second and the third times what I already did it. Both times I was somewhere 60% when I though 'wait I totally recognize this code but I just wrote it! What in Deja-vu-nation?!'.
jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
This is a not-so subtle advantage JavaScript has over 90% of everything else: Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), which exists/is-great in-large-part thanks to JavaScript being an alive language. Of the Stop Writing Dead Programs variety (https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/ https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235). It's just astoundingly capable, so very richly exposes such a featureful runtime, across so many dimensions of tooling. REPL, logging, performance, heap, profile, storage, tracing and others, just for the core, before you get into the browser based things. https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ This is such a core advantage to javascript: that it is an alive language. The runtime makes it very easy to change and modify systems ongoingly, and as an operator, that is so so so much better than having a statically compiled binary, in terms of what is possible. One of my favorite techniques is using SIGUSR1 to start the node debugger. Performance impact is not that bad. Pick a random container in prod, and... just debug it. Use logpoints instead of breakpoints, since you don't want to halt the world. Takes some scripting to SSH port forward to docker port forward to the container, but an LLM can crack that script out in no time. https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/debugging#enable-inspector https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/debugging#enable... My cherry on top is to make sure the services my apps consume are attached to globalThis, so I can just hit my services directly from the running instance, in the repl. Without having to trap them being used here or there.
keithnz 7mo ago
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.
- mjevans 7mo ago
  The log needs to document, at least in broad steps and critical details, what the next operation is and what key parameters were provided to it. A human, or an 'agent' can use those to figure out why said next step might have gone wrong.
  - ziml77 7mo ago
    This is the way I like to do it. I know bloating the logs too much can be a problem, but it's even worse if you're lacking information to reconstruct what happened when there ends up being a problem. And only providing that detail when there's an error isn't enough. What if the issue never triggered an error in the application and it was only caught later on either by a person seeing something was off or by an error a downstream system? Also it's helpful to log before operations rather than after because if a step gets stuck it's possible to know what it's stuck on.
- Spooky23 7mo ago
  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.
nubinetwork 7mo ago
I recently went all-in on the systemd ecosystem as much as I could on some recent hardware installs, and my biggest pet peeve is the double timestamps and double logs I find in journalctl... it's like they never intended you to read the logs...
- justinclift 7mo ago
  One fairly common approach to this for systems, is to configure the system to ship the logs to an external collection mechanism (FluentBit, etc) and do so in JSON format.
hinkley 7mo ago
Well the useful ones are. The rest are screaming into the void, or rather, the operator’s ear.
hinkley 7mo ago
For years now I’ve been pushing for moving of all non actionable error messages and all aggregate-actionable error messages into telemetry data instead. Not the least of which because log processing SaaS companies seem to be overcharging for their services even versus hosted Grafana services, and really many of us could do away with the rent seeking entirely. The computational complexity of finding meaning in log files versus telemetry data leans toward this always being the case. It will never change except in brief cases of VC money subsidizing your subscription. If an error shouldn’t trigger operator actions, but 1000 should, that’s a telemetry alert not a data dog or Splunk problem.
- xahrepap 7mo ago
  Honest question, how do you handle high cardinality data points? Reference to where my brain is at: https://www.robustperception.io/cardinality-is-key/ https://www.robustperception.io/cardinality-is-key/ I feel like splunk’s business model favors a healthy system and gives major disadvantages to an unhealthy one. What I mean in an example: when the system is unhealthy, I know it because all my splunk queries get queued up because everyone is slamming it with queries. I hate it. But I’m stuck in knowing how to move some things to Prometheus. Like say we have a CustomerID and we want to track number of times something is done by user. If we have thousands of customers, cardinality breaks that solution. Is there a good solution for this?
  - xahrepap 7mo ago
    Asking this question got me to stop being lazy and actually try to answer my own question. Mimir being one that caught my eye https://grafana.com/oss/mimir/ https://grafana.com/oss/mimir/
  - hinkley 7mo ago
    This gets even worse if you have a language with one process per CPU as you can get clobbering other values on the same instance if you don't add fields to uniquely identify them. We got a lot of pushback when migrating our telemetry to AWS after initially being told to just move it when they saw how OTEL amplified data points and cardinality versus our old StatsD data. You probably need less cardinality than you think, and there are a mix of stats that work fine with less frequent polling, while others like heap usage are terrible if you use 20 or 30 second intervals. Our Pareto frontier was to reduce the sampling rate of most stats and push per-process things like heap usage into histograms. An aggregator per box can drop a couple of tags before sending them upstream which can help considerably with the number of unique values. (eg, instanceID=[0..31] isn't that useful outside of the box)
foresto 7mo ago
Rather than indulging the inevitable argument that most users never read log messages, I hope we can remember a more important fact: Some users do read log messages, just as some users file useful bug reports. Even when they are a tiny minority, I find their discoveries valuable. They give me a view into problems that my software faces out there in the wilds of real-world use. My log messages enable those discoveries, and have led to improvements not only in my own code, but also in other people's projects that affect mine. This is part of why I include a logging system and (hopefully) understandable messages in my software. Even standalone tools and GUI applications. (And since I am among the minority who read log messages, I appreciate good ones in software made by other people. Especially when they allow me to solve a problem immediately, on my own, rather than waiting days or weeks get the developer's attention.)
brianjlogan 7mo ago
Not really true for modern cloud architectures. If you have an appropriately tuned Observability stack you're probably pretty familiar with the logs.

118 points by todsacerdoti 8mo ago

While I see the point the author is trying to make, I'm not really sure I agree. Most users don't even read error messages, never mind logs. At best, logs are something they need for compliance, for most, the concept doesn't exist at all. I do agree that the logs should help you understand what went wrong and why, but in that regard the principle is the same for both sysadmins and developers and I don't really see the difference?

hk__2 7mo ago
> Most users don't even read error messages, never mind logs. Yes, see all the questions on StackOverflow with people posting their error message without reading it, like “I got an error that says ‘fail! please install package xyz!’, what should I do?!?”.
- dexwiz 7mo ago
  That question is more likely how do I install, not what to install.
  - dylan604 7mo ago
    I think that's being very generous. If you've ever been in tech support, you'll be amazed at how often you'll be asked what to do when it tells me to do X. If they don't know how to do X, then they should be able to look up how to do X. If it's something like install 3rd party library, then that's not the first party's responsibility. Especially OSS for different arch/distros. They are all different. Look up the 3rd party's repo and figure it out. But no, it's contact support straight away.
    - dexwiz 7mo ago
      I've worked in tech support. I get that 25-50% of the cases appear to be "read the docs to me." But the majority of those is because docs are poorly written, are overwhelming for new users, or they don't understand them and won't admit that directly.
  - john_strinlai 7mo ago
    on friday i got 2 calls saying "my phone is no longer showing me my emails, please fix" when the error message they received was roughly "please reenter your password to continue using outlook". on wednesday i got a call saying "the CRM wont let me input this note, please fix" when the error message was "you have included an invalid character, '□' found in description. remove invalid characters and resubmit".
butterbomb 7mo ago
Oddly enough though, my journey into computers was greatly assisted by my curiosity at random log files that were being dumped to my desktop constantly.
tempest_ 7mo ago
Sysadmins needs logs that tell them what action they can do fix it. Developers need logs that tell them what a system is doing. Generally a sysadmin needs to know "is there an action I can do to correct this" where as a dev has the power to alter source code and thus needs to know what and where the system is doing things.
EvanAnderson 7mo ago
In my sysadmin work I curse every developer who makes me fire up strace, tcpdump, procmon, Wireshark, etc, because they couldn't be bothered to actually say what file couldn't be found, what TCP connection failed to be established. etc.
- lucianbr 7mo ago
  I get the impression that often it isn't laziness but the concept that error details leak information to an attacker and are therefore a vulnerability. I disagree with this view, but it definitely exists.
  - superjan 7mo ago
    Yeah, along those lines we have requirements on never logging PII, and not logging anything that potentially contains PII, such as folder names.
    - justinclift 7mo ago
      Maybe tokenise the PII part of the folder name when outputting it? ie `$HOME`/.config/foo/stuff.cfg` rather than `/home/joebloggs/foo/stuff.cfg`?
      - Terr_ 7mo ago
        Or have an encrypted data portion, so that the sensitive details can be revealed as-needed, and redaction occurs by rotating a key. Obviously that depends on the messages being infrequent in production logging levels.
  - EvanAnderson 7mo ago
    In a message returned by a server to a client I suppose it's defensible. For writing to syslog, event log, a log file, etc, it's not.
PunchyHamster 7mo ago
> Most users don't even read error messages, never mind logs. They don't need to. The log message is so helpdesk have something actionable, or so it can be copy pasted into google to find people with similar problem maybe having solution.
ragall 7mo ago
> but in that regard the principle is the same for both sysadmins and developers and I don't really see the difference? No, it's very different: developers generally want to know about things they control, so they want detailed debugging info about a program's internal state that could have caused a malfunction. Sysadmins don't care about that (they're fine with coalescing all the errors that developers care about under a general "internal error"), and they care about what in the program environment could have triggered the bug, so that they may entirely avoid it or at least deploy workarounds to sidestep the bug.

ignoramous 7mo ago

For a FOSS Android app I co-develop, we go out of our way to make verbose logging efficient to collect & easy to share (one-click copy). I've seen users get good mileage out of asking an LLM just what has gone wrong. We are adding more structure to log messages and add in as much state (like callstack) as possible with each log line, and diagnostics from procfs on resources held (like memory, threads, fds).

LgWoodenBadger 7mo ago

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 soul who fixed it and documented it.

thayne 7mo ago
> It’s particularly bad in the (Apple) mobile ecosystem It's been years since I've significantly used Apple software, but when I had to use a Mac at work, or helped friends or family troubleshoot some problem on Mac OS, I had a similar experience. When things don't "just work", it was very difficult to figure out why it didn't work.
bonoboTP 7mo ago
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 troubleshooting etc. In Apple land, you just take it to a slick genius bar and they do their magic. Or you just buy a new one. 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7mo ago
  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.
  - bonoboTP 7mo ago

naomi_kynes 7mo ago

[flagged]

jackfranklyn 7mo ago

[dead]

mfuzzey 7mo ago

Depends a lot on the context and type of software. For server side software where there is a sysadmin in charge of keeping it running I generally agree. But for end user software (desktop, mobile, embedded) no one wil read the logs and there the logs can, and probably should, be aimed at the developers. Of course you can and should still provide usable and informative end user oriented error messages but they're not the same thing as logs

PunchyHamster 7mo ago
It doesn't. The detailed log might be nonsense to the user but so is generic error, and the difference is that the specific log message makes it far easier to find solution than generic one. I.e. SEO-optimized
ragall 7mo ago
> But for end user software (desktop, mobile, embedded) no one wil [sic] read the logs Lots of end user software is used in an enterprise context where the helpdesk staff will have to read those logs. And for B2C (or retail, or amateur, whatever you want to call them) users, often they will go through online tutorials to try to self-diagnose because the developers are most of the time unreachable.
RadiozRadioz 7mo ago
A small subset of technical users do read logs. If a desktop app has a problem, I have a fighting chance of fixing it if I have logs. Error messages may not give the full picture; what was the app trying to do before the error occurred? Logs let me debug slowness and crashes.

majkinetor 7mo ago

Any group of people is target of specific log level. INFO for random folks, DEBUG for programmers etc.

bbkane 7mo ago
Yup, this is how I do it in https://github.com/bbkane/logos https://github.com/bbkane/logos

thangalin 7mo ago

Of possible interest: * https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2022/01/08/logging-code-smell/ * https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2026/02/03/lloopy-loops/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2026/02/03/lloopy-loops/ Both of these posts discuss using event-based frameworks to eliminate duplicative (cross-cutting) logging statements throughout a code base. My desktop Markdown editor[1], uses this approach to output log messages to a dialog box, a status bar, and standard error, effectively "for free". [1]: https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/keenwrite/tree/HEAD/src/main/java/com/keenwrite/events https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/keenwrite/tree/HEAD/src/main/j...

woeirua 7mo ago

I feel like this is an outdated point of view now. Logs are clearly going to be read primarily by agents very soon, if they're not already now. For example, we're experimenting with having Claude Desktop read log files for remote users. It's often able to troubleshoot and solve issues for our users faster than we can, especially after you give it access to your codebase through GH MCP or something like that. It's wild.

gnoack 7mo ago
How does this change the point that is being made in the article? Your agent is also only taking one of the existing roles that humans today occupy (e.g. the software operator or developer)
- woeirua 7mo ago
  If the logs are being read by agents then they should be more detailed and verbose to help the agent understand the root cause. We reduce the volume of information for humans. That doesn’t need to be the case any longer.

justsomehnguy 7mo ago

> But if your software is successful (especially if it gets distributed to other people), most of the people running it won't be the developers, they'll only be operating it. The biggest problem is what when you wrote a code for a 'totally obvious message' you yourself was in the context. Years, year, heck even weeks later you would stare at it and wonder 'why tf I didn't wrote something more verbose?'. Anecdote: I wrote some supporting scripts to 'integrate' two systems three times - totally oblivious the second and the third times what I already did it. Both times I was somewhere 60% when I though 'wait I totally recognize this code but I just wrote it! What in Deja-vu-nation?!'.

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago

This is a not-so subtle advantage JavaScript has over 90% of everything else: Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP), which exists/is-great in-large-part thanks to JavaScript being an alive language. Of the Stop Writing Dead Programs variety (https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/ https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33270235). It's just astoundingly capable, so very richly exposes such a featureful runtime, across so many dimensions of tooling. REPL, logging, performance, heap, profile, storage, tracing and others, just for the core, before you get into the browser based things. https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ This is such a core advantage to javascript: that it is an alive language. The runtime makes it very easy to change and modify systems ongoingly, and as an operator, that is so so so much better than having a statically compiled binary, in terms of what is possible. One of my favorite techniques is using SIGUSR1 to start the node debugger. Performance impact is not that bad. Pick a random container in prod, and... just debug it. Use logpoints instead of breakpoints, since you don't want to halt the world. Takes some scripting to SSH port forward to docker port forward to the container, but an LLM can crack that script out in no time. https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/debugging#enable-inspector https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/debugging#enable... My cherry on top is to make sure the services my apps consume are attached to globalThis, so I can just hit my services directly from the running instance, in the repl. Without having to trap them being used here or there.

keithnz 7mo ago

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.

mjevans 7mo ago
The log needs to document, at least in broad steps and critical details, what the next operation is and what key parameters were provided to it. A human, or an 'agent' can use those to figure out why said next step might have gone wrong.
- ziml77 7mo ago
  This is the way I like to do it. I know bloating the logs too much can be a problem, but it's even worse if you're lacking information to reconstruct what happened when there ends up being a problem. And only providing that detail when there's an error isn't enough. What if the issue never triggered an error in the application and it was only caught later on either by a person seeing something was off or by an error a downstream system? Also it's helpful to log before operations rather than after because if a step gets stuck it's possible to know what it's stuck on.
Spooky23 7mo ago
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.

nubinetwork 7mo ago

I recently went all-in on the systemd ecosystem as much as I could on some recent hardware installs, and my biggest pet peeve is the double timestamps and double logs I find in journalctl... it's like they never intended you to read the logs...

justinclift 7mo ago
One fairly common approach to this for systems, is to configure the system to ship the logs to an external collection mechanism (FluentBit, etc) and do so in JSON format.

hinkley 7mo ago

Well the useful ones are. The rest are screaming into the void, or rather, the operator’s ear.

hinkley 7mo ago

For years now I’ve been pushing for moving of all non actionable error messages and all aggregate-actionable error messages into telemetry data instead. Not the least of which because log processing SaaS companies seem to be overcharging for their services even versus hosted Grafana services, and really many of us could do away with the rent seeking entirely. The computational complexity of finding meaning in log files versus telemetry data leans toward this always being the case. It will never change except in brief cases of VC money subsidizing your subscription. If an error shouldn’t trigger operator actions, but 1000 should, that’s a telemetry alert not a data dog or Splunk problem.

xahrepap 7mo ago
Honest question, how do you handle high cardinality data points? Reference to where my brain is at: https://www.robustperception.io/cardinality-is-key/ https://www.robustperception.io/cardinality-is-key/ I feel like splunk’s business model favors a healthy system and gives major disadvantages to an unhealthy one. What I mean in an example: when the system is unhealthy, I know it because all my splunk queries get queued up because everyone is slamming it with queries. I hate it. But I’m stuck in knowing how to move some things to Prometheus. Like say we have a CustomerID and we want to track number of times something is done by user. If we have thousands of customers, cardinality breaks that solution. Is there a good solution for this?
- xahrepap 7mo ago
  Asking this question got me to stop being lazy and actually try to answer my own question. Mimir being one that caught my eye https://grafana.com/oss/mimir/ https://grafana.com/oss/mimir/
- hinkley 7mo ago
  This gets even worse if you have a language with one process per CPU as you can get clobbering other values on the same instance if you don't add fields to uniquely identify them. We got a lot of pushback when migrating our telemetry to AWS after initially being told to just move it when they saw how OTEL amplified data points and cardinality versus our old StatsD data. You probably need less cardinality than you think, and there are a mix of stats that work fine with less frequent polling, while others like heap usage are terrible if you use 20 or 30 second intervals. Our Pareto frontier was to reduce the sampling rate of most stats and push per-process things like heap usage into histograms. An aggregator per box can drop a couple of tags before sending them upstream which can help considerably with the number of unique values. (eg, instanceID=[0..31] isn't that useful outside of the box)

foresto 7mo ago

Rather than indulging the inevitable argument that most users never read log messages, I hope we can remember a more important fact: Some users do read log messages, just as some users file useful bug reports. Even when they are a tiny minority, I find their discoveries valuable. They give me a view into problems that my software faces out there in the wilds of real-world use. My log messages enable those discoveries, and have led to improvements not only in my own code, but also in other people's projects that affect mine. This is part of why I include a logging system and (hopefully) understandable messages in my software. Even standalone tools and GUI applications. (And since I am among the minority who read log messages, I appreciate good ones in software made by other people. Especially when they allow me to solve a problem immediately, on my own, rather than waiting days or weeks get the developer's attention.)

brianjlogan 7mo ago

Not really true for modern cloud architectures. If you have an appropriately tuned Observability stack you're probably pretty familiar with the logs.